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AMD Previews DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-and-better dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD invited 100 people up to their private suite in the hotel that Quakecon 2009 is being hosted at for a first look at gaming on one of their upcoming DirectX 11 graphics cards. This card has not been officially named yet, but it has the internal code name of 'Evergreen,' and was first shown to the media back at Computex over in Taiwan earlier this year. The guys from Legit Reviews were shown two different systems running DX11 hardware. One system was set up running a bunch of DX11 SDKs and the other was running a demo for the upcoming shooter Wolfenstein. The video card appears to be on schedule for its launch next month."

3 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Except by Suiggy · · Score: 5, Informative
    You are dead wrong. Direct3D 11 and Shader Model 5.0 is quite the step up from Direct3D 9 and SM 3.0. If you were a graphics developer you would know this. From Wikipedia:
    • Tessellation to increase at runtime the number of visible polygons from a low detail polygonal model.
    • Multithreaded rendering to render to the same Direct3D device object from different threads for multi core CPUs.
    • Compute shaders which exposes the shader pipeline for non-graphical tasks such as stream processing and physics acceleration, similar in spirit to what NVIDIA CUDA achieves, and HLSL Shader Model 5 among others.

    It also has a lot of awesome smaller features that make doing what are known as deferred shading/lighting pipelines more feasible. This is a good thing because it simplifies the amount of work needed in implementing game's material system while offering great performance at the cost of more GPU memory being used.

  2. Re:"DirectX 11" Hardware? by Suiggy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, it hasn't been this way since around 2003/2004. Essentially nVidia, ATI/AMD, Intel and a few other lesser known vendors sit down in league with Microsoft and decide what kind of features they will be able to implement in the next graphics hardware cycle. They then come up with the API and get feedback from the hardware vendors and work towards a final workable API. This is what we saw with Direct3D 9.0c, Direct3D 10, and Direct3D 11. OpenGL and the ARB has lagged way behind Microsoft and its partners, which is why the ARB was eventually disbanded and replaced by the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group kind of messed up OpenGL 3.0, they didn't implement half of the things they said they were going to do. As such, OpenGL 3.0 lagged quite a ways behind Direct3D 10. Fortunately, they've caught up, and OpenGL 3.2 is on par with Direct3D 10, but still a big step behind the new stuff in Direct3D 11. As such, Microsoft and it's partners are leading the pack here, and Khronos (and because most of Microsoft's Direct3D partners are also Khronos group members) is no playing the role of follower. You can be guaranteed that the next major revision to OpenGL to match Direct3D 11 almost exactly in features, as nVidia, ATI/AMD, et. al. don't want to deviate radically in their underlying hardware.

  3. Re:"DirectX 11" Hardware? by westlake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't be surprised if you were all Microsoft-paid trolls and marketers that are placing your twisted spin on things and making people continue to believe in your garbage.

    The hardware manufacturer talks to Microsoft. Microsoft talks to the hardware manufacturer.

    This - surprisingly enough - turns out to be mutually beneficial.