Assassin's Creed II for PC Uses Only DX9 Features
Got a fancy new video card? Assassin's Creed II won't take notice -- but it's still a beautiful game.
Assassin's Creed II was one of the best games I played and one of the few that I finished in 2009. I couldn't hold out for a PC release, but those of you who are waiting until early March to play this superlative sequel will get a few perks.
David Champagne, 3D Lead Programmer of Assassin's Creed II, said in an interview with PC Games Hardware, "We spent quite some time improving the performances of the PC version by taking advantage of multi-core processors. The PC version also supports much higher resolutions than the console version and multi-sampling modes up to 8X (as opposed to the console version which only supports 2X)."
Assassin's Creed II will also take full advantage of quad core processors, especially for those who can process more than a single thread. "We now support up to 8 threads. Our engine being mainly task-based since AC1, it has been pretty easy to scale up and parallelize the various tasks all over the multiple threads." Champagne added. "Most of our game systems, including AI, physics, animation and rendering, are taking advantage of multi-threading. … Physics is a task as any other tasks in our engine. We don't reserve a specific thread to perform the physics calculations. We didn't have the chance to look into Nvidia's Physx."
Those of you expecting more whiz-bang effects over the console versions will be disappointed, however, as Assassin's Creed II is a DirectX 9 affair.
"We are using the same rendering engine as the Xbox 360 version which is based on DX9. Integrating DX11 in our renderer would have definitely been too much time-consuming given our release date," said Champagne. "Assassin's Creed II has no specific support for DX10 (but the game still runs smoothly on both DX10 and DX11 systems)."
While that piece of news is disappointing for gamers who have purchased a new ATI Radeon HD for DX11 hotness, Champagne cites a Steam survey that has 40 percent of gamers still using Windows XP.
So when will he feel the need to jump to the newer API? "I guess when most of the gamers will have switched to DX11. ;) According to Steam HW Survey, 40% of the gamers are still playing under Windows XP. I think we'll have to wait a bit..." he answered.
As a PC gamer I am sick of being treated as a second or third class gamer.
It is not just the games you play or how you play it but what you play them on. Console games are getting more and more crummy, I miss the good old days ware each console had games that justified the existence of the console as well had character like the classic N64 or the PS2. The good old days are long gone now like 3DFX. Software is getting more and more sloppy for all platforms.
love the game though. already finished it on my xbox, but may have to try the pc version too.
As a PC gamer I am sick of being treated as a second or third class gamer.
It is not just the games you play or how you play it but what you play them on. Console games are getting more and more crummy, I miss the good old days ware each console had games that justified the existence of the console as well had character like the classic N64 or the PS2. The good old days are long gone now like 3DFX. Software is getting more and more sloppy for all platforms.
IIRC, DX10 isn't.
So, to me, this is a good thing.
Only disappointing if you weren't alive when DX8, 9 and 10 came out. How good were they 5 months in? Who writes this stuff? Or am I suppose to cut up ATi 5000 series owners for not being able to use DX11 on a card that came to be months into AC II's development? DiRT 2 does have support and it's not great. Visually or performance-wise.
The only other title that performs better in DX10 that I know of is Far Cry 2.
Just like how the best Wii titles take advantage of the hardware, the same applies for DX11 GPUs. In the meanwhile, DX11 and DX10 will looks nearly the exact same as DX9 while working the system a whole lot more.
WTF why are they just now doing this? Dosnt the 360 have a triple core processor? Wasnt there multi core systems around for AC1?
I dont get it.