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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."
I feel so sorry that they can't run the latest games at 2560x1600.
... 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.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
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."
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?
I don't think it is really useful to look at. DirectX 10 is brand new on the market so who knows how well optimised everything is? The drivers for the cards could very well need work. If you were a graphics can company what would you spend your time on: DirectX 9 which is what almost every game runs on, or DirectX 10 which there's maybe 3 game patches for? Also the games themselves may need improvements. Just because they've ported to DirectX 10, doesn't mean they did a good job of it. Any one remember the original Unreal Tournament? At its heart it was a Glide game and it just never ran as well on GL or DirectX, particularly DirectX. UT2003 was DX at its heart and ran smoking fast. It was to the point that on good DX hardware UT2003 could run faster than its predecessor, despite higher visual detail.
At this point DirectX 10 is more or less just a plaything. Cards are out supporting it, since hardware is almost always ahead of software (harder to develop for something that doesn't exist), but it is brand new and few systems support it (only systems running Vista using teh very newest graphics hardware). IT is at this point a curiosity for the most part. It's not really useful to start talking about performance until there's been a good deal more time for people to work with it, including making games designed for it, not ported to it.
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.
Personally, I'm grateful to them for making Vista so expensive in terms of upgrade price and hardware requirements. Without the added push I'd have stayed with Windows instead of switching to Ubuntu / Beryl (which looks much prettier than Aero, IMO). And without that push, I'd never have found out that it 'just works' at least as well as Windows does (at least for my hardware, maybe I was lucky), and can run WoW (my only Windows-specific app) through WiNE, with almost no tweaking, at a higher frame rate than in Windows. Only been running a day so far, but I can't see me going back.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Personally, the most interesting feature of DX10 is the hardware virtualization, so programs can share the card. Should make it possible to play a game on one monitor while playing a movie on another, for example. Presumably these cards wouldn't have a problem with this...
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.
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
The reason Microsoft couldn't reasonably do Aero under DirectX9 has to do with baselines. One of the biggest advantages of DirectX 10 has less to do with what it is and more to do with what it isn't: old. Microsoft needed a way to do two things: 1) make sure that people weren't trying to run Aero on 386es, and 2) a simply way to tell non-technical people whether or not their hardware was up to modern spec.
Does DirectX9 have all the capabilities needed to run something like Aero? Yes, but DirectX9 also runs on systems which would drag under the demands of something like Aero. Microsoft has a vested interest in preventing their new software from running on hardware which will struggle with Aero, because then there'll be a lot of people complaining about how (insert the bad side of slow Aero here.)
DirectX10 has a much higher minimum bar to entry. If your stuff is DirectX10 ready, it's almost certainly Aero ready. That's why they made the requirement - they didn't want old hardware making their shiny new product look like crap. (That it forces new hardware purchase, which gets OEMs and VARs to support the new OS, certainly helps.)
If you look at it from a business perspective at the same time that you look at it from a technical and an "oh god I have to deal with stupid users" perspective, you'll start to see why just using the DirectX name to set the new low watermark was actually a relatively simple way for Microsoft to flatten several problems at once.
StoneCypher is Full of BS