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AMD Demos DirectX 11-Capable ATI Graphics Card

Posted by timothy on from the indirectx-is-too-subtle dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Today at a press conference in Taiwan, AMD demonstrated the world's first GPU capable of DirectX 11 technology. The demonstrations shows the major improvements DirectX 11 gives us over DirectX 10 and also shows us what AMD has in store for an ATI Graphics Card coming out before the end of 2009 capable of DirectX 11. AMD shows three primary features of DirectX 11: a tessellator, which allows for less blocky and more fluid and realistic details; compute shaders which allows for less restricted programming; and finally, how DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores."

18 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Direct X11? by TeknoHog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or is Microsoft finally catching up with the unix world?

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  2. Will programmers be able to utilize? by gubers33 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That is the real question, the PS3 for example has amazing computing speed and a great graphics card, but game programmers have yet been able to utilize the system to its full potential. I'll be curious to see if the same occurs here.

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    1. Re:Will programmers be able to utilize? by nobodylocalhost · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think tessellation will be controllable on the driver side, in that case, you wont need to write specialized code in order to take advantage of it.
      From what I understand, it is basically point based curve matching using differential calculus - a fundamental change in the way models are being rendered. So even for existing games, you just need to turn on tessellation processing with your graphics card driver, and you should be able to take advantage of it due to the fact it just changes the rendering method, models themselves and other parameters should remain the same.

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    2. Re:Will programmers be able to utilize? by Handlarn · · Score: 2, Informative

      That would produce some bad looking results, as the driver wouldn't know the difference between a model that is intentionally polygonal and one that is not.

  3. Linux drivers? by anjilslaire · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, but will it run with all of the bells and whistles (sans DirectX, of course) on Linux? Will they have solid drivers available on release?

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    1. Re:Linux drivers? by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When has ATI had solid anything drivers. Even the Windows drivers cause BSoDs for no apparent reason.

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    2. Re:Linux drivers? by harryandthehenderson · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That might also be a Linux community's fault. Linux never provided solid driver development kit.

      Doesn't seem to have stopped nVIDIA from making a pretty solid driver for Linux.

    3. Re:Linux drivers? by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

      Doesn't seem to have stopped nVIDIA from making a pretty solid driver for Linux.

      nVidia basicly overrode the lower third or so of X11 (it's a big function pointer table) and wrote their own implementation, ATI did the same except with less success. AMD/Intel is now trying to invent a proper open source stack with graphics execution manager (GEM) for memory management, kernel mode setting (KMS) for flicker free boots and more, low-level state tracking framework called Gallium3D to expose modern shaders, better direct rendering interface (DRI2), redirected direct rendering (RDR) and various other improvements but you're talking about things only 1-2 years old. nVidia has succeeded yes but for most intents and purposes they wrote the whole thing themselves, There's a reason it's a sore point for open source fanatics, it's not merely a blob addon it basicly ripped out a whole chunk of open source, said "not good enough" and replaced it with their own blob.

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    4. Re:Linux drivers? by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There's a reason it's a sore point for open source fanatics, it's not merely a blob addon it basicly ripped out a whole chunk of open source, said "not good enough" and replaced it with their own blob.

      No one gives a shit if Nvidia said the open source part was "not good enough" - we give shit because what nvidia replaced it with is broken and can't be fixed. I wasted over $600 on two top-end nvidia cards due to their supposed "great linux support" only to have them fail to work with my high end monitor because of an extremely simple TMDS configuration bug in their driver.

      When I jumped through all the hoops of their ultimately bullshit support on a freakin webforum and gave them all the debug output they requested and then even spelled out what the problem was and suggestions for them to fix it, all I got was dead fucking silence. Not even, a "we'll get to that in the next release or two," nada.

      Open source fanatics are fanatics because open source lets us fix problems the vendor won't or can't. I was moderately pro-open source beforehand, but Nvidia pushed me firmly into the camp of fanatics after they wasted my money with their bullshit and false promises.

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  4. meh, we go through this every few years by docbrody · · Score: 2, Funny

    so what, another update to Direct X and another batch of video cards that support it. Or partially support some of the features, or 100% all of the key features, but not some others. or some variation on that. Blah blah blah

  5. Closer to the ultimate goal by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Realistic 3D CGI porn. Of course.

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  6. So... by eexaa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...so they are shipping real drivers with ATI cards? Great!

    (In fact, I hope that they finally do something about this. I was forced to avoid any ATI hardware for over 5 years now, just because of driver incompatibilities. It's just sad.)

  7. Yet Another Feature... by ADRA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    that isn't in XP, hence nobody cares. You'll have the what, 30% market segment with Vista, and maybe 10% that are regular gamers who will be using this.

    This will just encourage the further brokenness that Windows is turning the PC gaming platform. Good Job!

    PS: Before everyone jumps in to say that everyone will jump into Win7, I think you're mistaken. The only way Microsoft will kill XP for most existing users would be to introduce a critical bug that they choose not to fix. I played with Win7 for a few days and can safely say that it doesn't add anything that I've ever wanted to use that a trivial search for google wouldn't find an as-good or better alternative. And maybe its just me, but pretty much every single UI 'enhancement' since circa Win2k is always a step backwards in terms of -my- productivity.

    Its lucky that I'm Linux competent since Fedora/Gnome makes practically everything I need easy and uncluttered. If the barrier for entry was a little lower, I could see mass exodus potential coming as XP users take an honest look at what they -really- want to update to.

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  8. 3D CGI Porn by Petersko · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Realistic 3D CGI porn. Of course."

    I guess that's for people who find it's just too creepy to have actual porn actresses in their downloaded mpg's... watching them... laughing at them... judging them...

    With CGI porn, the disconnect is complete! It has become a truly solitary masturbatory experience, the last vestiges of shared sexuality banished.

    WOO.... hoo?

    1. Re:3D CGI Porn by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 2

      No, it's for people who are all like "yea baby, oh, touch yourself, yea more of that, NO NO DON'T LICK THE TITTY! who told you that licking your own titty is sexy? It's not, so stop that. God if I were the director, I would have slapped you for that. Now look what you did, you killed my boner."

      With computer CGI porn, no actress will lick her own titties ever again.

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      Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
  9. The real question is... by nycguy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Will Duke Nukem Forever wait to take advantage of DirectX 11?

    1. Re:The real question is... by ichigo+2.0 · · Score: 2, Funny

      I thought 3drealms going bankrupt would end the DNF meme. Guess I was wrong.

  10. This one goes up to 11 by nschubach · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about they work on their DX 10 performance first.

    Because this one goes up to 11, so obviously it's better.

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