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Real Life DirectX 10 Performance
AnandTech has a look at the performance PC gamers can expect see under Windows Vista with DirectX 10. Unfortunately, it isn't pretty. Despite the power of the new 10-compliant graphics cards, the choices made in developing this technology have resulted in a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable from commercial PC hardware. What's worse, the article starts off by pointing out that much of the shiny effects exclusive to DX10 games would have been possible with DX9, had Microsoft been inclined to develop in that direction. From the article: "[Current] cards are just not powerful enough to enable widespread use of any features that reach beyond the capability of DirectX 9. Even our high-end hardware struggled to keep up in some cases, and the highest resolution we tested was 2.3 megapixels. Pushing the resolution up to 4 MP (with 30" display resolutions of 2560x1600) brings all of our cards to their knees. In short, we really need to see faster hardware before developers can start doing more impressive things with DirectX 10."
... that people who bought DX10 cards so that in the future they will be able to play DX10 games when they come out have basically been sold a "Pig in a Poke". As its currently constituted DX-10 pretty much only serves as a device to obsolete Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista.
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If the HL2 / Doom3 generation of games taught us anything. Don't believe the hype. Don't upgrade your computer for a game you don't have yet. By the time there's something interesting that requires you to upgrade, it will cost less to do so, and probably perform better.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Some interesting points in the article, but I'm unsure at how running tests that are hyper bandwidth-bottlenecked is any indication of the performance of DX10 features.
"OMG I can't push 30498230894384023984 pixels/sec through my DX10 card, DX10 sucks."
... XP will still be preferred over Vista for years to come, until Microsoft pulls this same stunt enough:
Crippling a perfectly fine system to force people to 'upgrade' to a [insert complaint here]-encumbered, bloated mess vis-a-vis Vista.
Shadowrun is a nice example. It can be played on Windows XP with a hack.
According to Microsoft, its simply not possible as the XP version is still under development. It comes as no big surprise that DX9 can do 90% of what DX10 can do, especially since DX10 is Vista-only. Its just another attempt to push an operating system that very few people want. I'm sure I'll end up with a copy of it in a few years, but very few people actually want it right now.
No developer outside of Microsoft in their right mind would make a Vista-only game right now. It would be like releasing some Virutal Boy games.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Current top cards (2900 and 8800) already use a lot of power, something like 200W or even more. They require powerful cooling, but it seems that every new graphics card generation tends to use a lot more power than the previous one. It's likely that a better manufacturing process (45nm?) will lower the power consumption slightly, but that's probably going to be offset by higher clocks to get it to the same thermal envelope.
What's the future of the cards' successors like? How long before graphics cards are going to be moved outside the computer, to their specialized cases? Or do you think something like Conroe will happen in the GPU market (vastly lower power consumption than the P4/Tbird, better performance on the same clock speed)? Is that even possible with GPUs and the never-ending quest for framerate and visual effects?
The games that Anand benchmarked with were not written from the ground up for DirectX 10. Company of Heroes was DX9 until the developers were nice enough to release a patch. Some developers have said that good DX10 performance requires writing from the ground up for DX10. Since DX10 is so different from DX9, I don't find this difficult to believe.
As soon as NVidia releases certified drivers for doing SLI in Vista. The problem with driving 30" LCDs will disappear.
People are forgetting how many years it takes to create a new AAA game title and the fact that game developers still have very little reason to be attracted to Vista. What with it's small installed base and hardware requirements for consumers.
But the fact is, anyone who bought an 8800 of any variety (the "dx10 cards") bought the fastest DX9 card on the market for use with any game they wanted at the time of purchase. It spanked the next card down, and didn't carry any more of a price premium than any other high end card in the history of discrete graphics (indeed, it carried less of a premium if you looked at price/performance). It was a fast card "right then" regardless of DX10. They didn't sacrifice anything, the DX10 compatibility was just value-added bonus.
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Then maybe developers will start focusing more on playability and less on eye candy? Anyone?
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I've heard this argument thousands of times (especially during arguments about Wii vs. Xbox 360 vs. PS3)
What people have to realize is that graphics and sound are PART OF THE GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE. Imagine playing Halo without the soundtrack playing in the background, or riding across the field in Zelda:OoT without the theme music playing. Imagine playing Warcraft III with crappy 2D 600x400 graphics or playing Banjo Kazooie for the N64 in black and white and 3 polygons per model.
These things would ruin these games. It destroys the experience; you can't only rely on gameplay and you can't only rely on graphics. It's a mixture...
besides listen to the market. It's obvious that eye candy sells consistently
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