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The First DirectX 11 Game is BattleForge
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A new generation of graphics... an old game.
DirectX 11 is heralded as to usher in yet another new generation of GPU goodness, especially for games. New features such as tessellation will enable artists to make smoother and less blocky models in 3D games. DX11 is also better able to take advantage of CPUs with multiple cores.
Games aside, the biggest addition of all could be the compute shader, which will finally bring in the GPGPU that’s been all the buzz lately.
So right now, we've been waiting for the first DirectX 11 supporting game to come by to wow us – and now it's finally here.
A new patch for the EA free-to-play fantasy card game BattleForge enables DirectX 11 functions and promises smoother framerates along with new graphical effects on DX11 systems with DX11 hardware.
Of course, Windows 7 has yet to officially launch, and DX11 support for Windows Vista hasn’t yet been released. For hardware, only the recently launched ATI Radeon HD 5800 series support DX11, and those are just hitting stores now.
While we're glad that DX11 software is here, we're still waiting for that killer app that'll make us upgrade.
Source : Tom's Hardware US
- Best PCIe Card: $80 To $130 article - does DirectX 11 matter? [Graphic & Displays]
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I still remember when ATI launched the original Radeon in 2000. Brian Hentschel called me up to ask for my opinion on the chip’s name, and I remember thinking Radeon was horrible. Shows you how well I’d do in PR. That architecture emphasized the gaming experience, with two pixel pipelines and three texture units per pipeline. Though the Radeon had a fairly high texel rate, pixel fill rate was what won the day back then, and the decision to “go pretty” ceded the performance battle to Nvidia. nVidia GeForce GTX 285... Dell Home $499.99 Newegg.com $394.99 Amazon.com $404.59 With R300 in 2002, ATI went the other way, putting its money behind eight pixel pipelines, each with a single texture unit—the focus was on performance—and the bet paid off. ATI smoked the GeForce4 Ti 4600 and fared well enough against an embarrassingly-loud GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Performance or experience—which is better? With the Radeon HD 5870, ATI says it’s gunning for both. We’ve already covered the architecture, ATI’s key to delivering performance with Cypress. Now let’s take a closer look at the experience. ATI is relying on three components enabled through hardware here: its Eyefinity technology, Stream, and DirectX 11. Right off the bat, I think it’s fairly safe to say that for all of the hoopla ATI made about its DirectX 10.1 support, real gamers in the real world never saw a tangible benefit. I’ve played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; I’ve played H.A.W.X. The experience on a DirectX 10 card versus DirectX 10.1 is not worth mention. And for that matter, I’d also argue that DirectX 10 hasn’t had as profound on impact on gaming experience as prior versions of the API. Why should we believe DirectX 11 is going to be any more prolific than its predecessor? The reality of the situation is that DirectX 11 probably won’t be as impactful as DirectX 8 or 9, both of which introduced key shading capabilities. But it is seen as the next logical step for ISVs still working with DirectX 9, since it’s a super-set of DirectX 10/10.1 supporting existing hardware, plus DX11 cards. Microsoft has made sure it's easier to code with DX11, so we really are expecting to see a faster up-take of the API than DirectX 10. New Features The notable features supported by DX11 are illustrated in the chart below. FeatureDirectX 10DirectX 10.1DirectX 11Tessellation--xShader Model--xDirectCompute 11--xDirectCompute 10.1-xxDirectCompute 10xxxMulti-ThreadingxxxBC6/BC7 Texture Compression--x ATI has included tessellation support in its GPUs since 2001. And while I’m not sure how much play those early hardware implementations actually got in the game development world, they’ve helped pave the way for tessellation as it exists today, exposed through a number of different implementations (Catmull-Clark subdivision surface modeling, Bézier patch meshes, n-patches, displacement mapping, and adaptive/continuous tessellation). Of course, the benefits of tessellation are apparent—more polygons mean more detail and hence more realism. And because tessellation is now standardized as a component of DirectX 11, ISVs are more likely to lean on it without the frustration of only supporting one vendor’s hardware. In fact, we saw Rebellion demonstrate tessellation in its upcoming Aliens Vs. Predator title, launching in Q1 of next year. DirectX 11 also introduces Shader Model 5.0, which offers developers a more object-oriented approach to coding HLSL. Ideally, this will help motivate ISVs to adopt the new API quicker, since programming becomes cleaner and more efficient (for a more specific example of this in practice, check out Fedy’s DirectX 11 preview). Gamers with multi-core processors should realize performance gains from DirectX 11-based titles by virtue of threading optimizations made to the API. ATI and Nvidia have been shipping multi-threaded drivers for three years now capable of dispatching commands to the GPU in parallel. According to Nvidia, this was worth anywhere from 10 to 40 percent additional performance back in ’06. But DirectX 11 goes even further, allowing the application, DirectX runtime, and driver to run in separate threads. ATI gives the example of loading textures or compiling shaders in parallel with the main rendering thread. In essence, the threading is much more granular, which, almost ironically, should prove more beneficial to AMD and Intel than ATI and Nvidia. Wait. Yeah. That’s a real win for AMD, isn’t it? Improved texture compression is another one of those developer-oriented enhancements that will benefit gamers through greater rendering quality without the expected corresponding performance hit to memory bandwidth. DirectX 11 includes two new block compression formats: BC6 and BC7. BC6 enables up to 6:1 compression of 16-bit high dynamic range textures with hardware decompression support. BC7 delivers up to 3:1 compression of eight-bit textures and normal maps.
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Of course, the big-daddy feature of DirectX 11 is DirectCompute, an API that facilitates more general purpose GPU computing across the latest DX11 cards, in addition to DX10 and DX10.1 boards. As you ascend the DirectX hierarchy, you get more and more features enabled through DirectCompute. Applications of DirectCompute include image/post-processing, physics, ray-tracing, AI, order-independent transparency, and shadow rendering—in addition to the video transcoding stuff we’ve already seen from Stream and CUDA. This is interesting, since most of the examples of GPGPU computing have centered on video transcoding and post-processing through titles like CyberLink MediaShow Espresso and ArcSoft’s SimHD. Now we’re seeing the technology folded into gaming. Indeed, this is a result of game developers getting access to ATI’s Stream technology through a standardized interface, which we’ve long-maintained would be a requisite for widespread adoption. Take order-independent transparency, for example. In the past, rendering multiple overlapping alpha-blended objects involved heavy sorting, from back to front, of each object. Pre-DX11, this would have involved a lot of host processor computation, and even then you won’t necessarily get a visually-accurate result. In DirectX 11, transparent pixels are sorted using atomic operations and append buffers in just one pass. Check out the screenshots from the demo below. There’s plenty more that can be done with DirectCompute, from high definition ambient occlusion to contact-hardened shadows and depth of field post-processing. ATI even showed off a demo of drag-and-drop transcoding through Windows 7. But when we asked ATI about tests we could use to put DirectCompute to the test, it responded that there’s nothing available yet. So, we’ll wait for third-party ISVs to utilize DirectCompute before going into more depth on it. On tap: Aliens Vs. Predator, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, and Colin McRae: Dirt 2—all to be enabled with DirectCompute functionality in the next few months.
Oo, free-to-play...
I am still sitting on the fence about goinf to DX11 or not myself. For the cost of 1 5800's series card I can have several of the 4800 series. GPGPU is still along way off from being effective at anything I believe. Hardware dont matter without the software written for it
ARE YOU LISTENING, NVIDIA! I hope so. I've been a supporter since you absorbed my beloved 3DFX; but now, the Radeon HD 5850/5870 is starting to look DAMN good!
Crysis 2 anyone? Kidding...but you know some game similar to Crysis will be made just to show off DX 11.
Yes, you've said it many times before, but good news for the dx11 patch for it.
Hope we see better performance (based) on DX11 than with DX10 for every game, not just based on the polish to this particular game with this patch.
Starcraft would be nice right about now. I hear it gots DX11.
Am I the only one underwhelmed by Tesselation in DX11. More polygons arent even going to be noticeable unless youve got really high resolutions and textures. The promise of more consistent framerates has me intrigued, but ive got a superclocked 4850 that i believe will hold out for me until Nvidia drops the GTX380, if not longer.
Jellico, nv is cranking out the new fermi card soon, it's supposed to blow away the 5870.
Am I the only one underwhelmed by Tesselation in DX11. More polygons arent even going to be noticeable unless youve got really high resolutions and textures.
>_> thats why you crank up the resolution up to 1920x1200 (and have a big monitor)
Wow and come to think of it, directx10 doesn't have a high attach rate afaik right now. DX11 can only be slower
But on the other hand it is good to see progress.
Jellico, nv is cranking out the new fermi card soon, it's supposed to blow away the 5870.
I certainly hope so. Because it wasn't that long ago that we heard this:
"DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU," said Mike Hard, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia.
And so it begins. Now I just need a USB 3.0 mobo to be release and I'm starting a new PC build. My socket 939 rig needs an upgrade.
At 1920x1200, you still don't see the polygons too much. In a good game, you don't see it enough to think: Sheesh, look at that, I wish there was more polygons. They are not noticable.
I'm curious why you release this news now, while this was already released and mentioned in a good ton of 5870 reviews I've read.
At 1920x1200, you still don't see the polygons too much. In a good game, you don't see it enough to think: Sheesh, look at that, I wish there was more polygons. They are not noticable.
New technology overlapping current technology is what makes games and the hardware race (nvidia vs ati, intel vs amd) so fascinating. Soon monitor manufacturers will be forced to crank up the engineers to make even higher resolutions to help show off all the polygons and details in dx11. You just have to love this "SPORT"!
To anyone that think tessellation is useless, I'd put a brake right now. Tessellation is already widely used but done by CPU. Hardware tessellation will be even more powerful. Terrain at a distance will be of higher quality (remember oblivion at a distance?).
Right now, you might not see the need, however even with DirectX 10, the addition of the extrusion shaders will open the door to really powerful visual like knots in tree that will be more than just shadow trick.
DirectX 11 open the way to hardware physics that are platform independant. I'm not even talking about the new Shader language that will help the developpers make new powerful shaders. It will be easier to reuse shader now, this mean that we'll start to see even more incredibly impressive shaders that will only get better and better over time.
If people adopt it fast enough, it'll be the start of a new era in gaming. It's not even funny. If not, we'll eternally drag three generation of progress for years. Which is not something anybody wants.
Speedtree goodness:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/G [...] _ch04.html
Hope there are more DX11 games relatively soon I hope there's a good crop when I finally save up to get a Radeon 5850
Wow, the comments are bugged here. I never hit "submit" and it posted those words when I clicked "log in" at the top of the screen. FFS Tom's, please fix this.
At any rate, I AM also underwhelmed. Wasn't tessellation/n-patches supposed to be "the new big thing" in DirectX 8? I remember hearing nVidia boasting about it and Morrowind back in like 2002. Then it was boasted about in DX 9. Then 9.0c. Then DirectX 10. Then DirectX 10.1. And now DirectX 11? I just skip over it when I see it.
Yes, it does all look good, but the price for the 5870 is a little hard to swallow. I guess $260US for a 5850 is somewhat acceptable, though, but seeing that you can get a pair of 4850s for less than $200US now... It might be a little bit of a hard sell, especially when a single 4850 or 4870 is plenty enough for most that don't have a CrossFire-capable board.
As far as the GTX 300 series, is there anything even known about them? I started to have some shaken faith in nVidia when I saw a comment from them along the lines of "GPGPU is the future for high-end GPUs, not gaming." If they really believe that, I have my doubts that as a card, the GT300 series will be competitive with the 5800 series. nVidia just might go with a smaller GPU that will only be relatively incremental over the GTX 285, compared to the roughly doubling we saw with the 5800 vs. the 4800.
Fermi is going to eat the 5870 for lunch and still have left over for dinner!
stalker call of pripyat is DX11
Well see about that blesse, and we'll see about the cost also. Damn fanboys need to wait to see results instead of believing the hype.
openCL 3.0.
Another side of the tessellation that I think everyone is missing is that it should allow us to render the current quantity of polygons with less overhead helping to take the load off the GPU a little. So it might give you more frames per second rendered for the same games you already play. Which if this is true it would be nice.
...As far as the GTX 300 series, is there anything even known about them? I started to have some shaken faith in nVidia when I saw a comment from them along the lines of "GPGPU is the future for high-end GPUs, not gaming." If they really believe that, I have my doubts that as a card, the GT300 series will be competitive with the 5800 series. nVidia just might go with a smaller GPU that will only be relatively incremental over the GTX 285, compared to the roughly doubling we saw with the 5800 vs. the 4800.
Could you do some research before making a comment. 90% of the comments here is already AMD/ATI fanboyism; we really don't need you to spread false rumors.
Check out this article so you know Nvidia's approach to next gen GPU
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651
I know people here like underdogs (Intel vs. AMD, Nvidia vs. ATI) but some of the stuffs said are pure non-sense from a logical and technical point of view. I wish people would wait until actual review from Tom’s and Anand’s before making a claim.
This isn't going to suck as much as the change from 9 to 10 is it?
Although it's nice to see a DX11 game come out before the OS & hardware technically support it, I'm still interested in seeing if the industry picks up on DX11 better than it did DX10.
Let's face it, DX10 was made out to be a huge deal, but was sort of a flop. Sure, it enabled some bits of eye candy, but I just don't think it became as big a deal as it should have.
ATI has my interested piqued though with their 5800 series. I sure hope nVidia is not too far off... in the least it'll make prices come down when they're both in the game.
When I think of Nvidia the song Robber Baron by Voltaire comes to mind.
"Could you do some research before making a comment. 90% of the comments here is already AMD/ATI fanboyism; we really don't need you to spread false rumors.
Check out this article so you know Nvidia's approach to next gen GPU
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651
I know people here like underdogs (Intel vs. AMD, Nvidia vs. ATI) but some of the stuffs said are pure non-sense from a logical and technical point of view. I wish people would wait until actual review from Tom’s and Anand’s before making a claim."
The link is talking about the "Tesla" which is a corporate/scientific GPU not consumer. You are talking several thousand dollars easily. When Nvidia brings out a GPU on the market that can compete with AMD latest offering then I'm sure people here would gladly look at it. Until then AMD has the crown.
Am I the only one underwhelmed by Tesselation in DX11. More polygons arent even going to be noticeable unless youve got really high resolutions and textures. The promise of more consistent framerates has me intrigued, but ive got a superclocked 4850 that i believe will hold out for me until Nvidia drops the GTX380, if not longer.
Ugh thats why ive had a really high res monitor 1920 x 1200 since Jan 2007 before anyone had a 24" and paid $730 for the privelage. Now its time to move up to 30" 2560 x 1600 since everyone and their brother are getting a 24". Cant have what everyone else does. Nvidia is going down the tubes btw.
For everybody talking about the next-gen fermi gpu that gpu is not even going to be targetted at consumers. It is being specifically designed for Tesla processing. I'm not saying that it won't be better or worse than the 5800 but remember a tesla gpu starts at a couple $1000 and not designed for gaming. Now it might kill the 5800 at gaming but nothing that will compete with in price. Now Nvidia could downsize their gpu and make it compete but the latest anandtech article is talking about Nvidia aiming it towards agencies that spend millions on supercomputers not home users. But hopefully they downsize and compete with amd because we all know when their is no competition a company stops producing better products. Look at how intel lost to amd with the k8 then amd lost to intel with core 2 duo. Don't forget about after ati 2000 series Nvidia mopped the floor with them and now well ati is in the lead. competition is good and gives us better products.
"Could you do some research before making a comment. 90% of the comments here is already AMD/ATI fanboyism; we really don't need you to spread false rumors.Check out this article so you know Nvidia's approach to next gen GPUhttp://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651I know people here like underdogs (Intel vs. AMD, Nvidia vs. ATI) but some of the stuffs said are pure non-sense from a logical and technical point of view. I wish people would wait until actual review from Tom’s and Anand’s before making a claim."The link is talking about the "Tesla" which is a corporate/scientific GPU not consumer. You are talking several thousand dollars easily. When Nvidia brings out a GPU on the market that can compete with AMD latest offering then I'm sure people here would gladly look at it. Until then AMD has the crown.
AMD's had the crown for all of 5 days or so. Congratulations.