DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 2, 2009 @06:20PM from the shadows-with-shadows dept.

MojoKid writes "The PC demo for Codemasters' upcoming DirectX 11 racing title, Dirt 2, has just hit the web and is available for download. Dirt 2 is a highly-anticipated racing sim that also happens to feature leading-edge graphic effects. In addition to a DirectX 9 code path, Dirt 2 also utilizes a number of DirectX 11 features, like hardware-tessellated dynamic water, an animated crowd and dynamic cloth effects, in addition to DirectCompute 11-accelerated high-definition ambient occlusion (HADO), full floating-point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and full-screen resolution post processing. Performance-wise, DX11 didn't take its toll as much as you'd expect this early on in its adoption cycle." Bit-tech also took a look at the graphical differences, arriving at this conclusion: "You'd need a seriously keen eye and brown paper envelope full of cash from one of the creators of Dirt 2 to notice any real difference between textures in the two versions of DirectX."

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Re:OpenGL by QuoteMstr · 2009-12-02 19:37 · Score: 5, Informative

This is the most ill-informed comment I've ever seen.
You don't have a "direct path" to the hardware on modern computers at all. After all, you're not filling DMAed command buffers and programming memory registers, and you don't want to be: the details would drive you to madness. That's what we have drivers for.
OpenGL and Direct3D are both abstraction layers for the hardware. Neither is intrinsically more "direct", but both were certainly designed for real-time 3D rendering (although OpenGL was initially more used for CAD applications than games).