nVidia and AMD-PC gaming

[jAkUp]

Personally I think tessellation is pretty cool, I am pretty tired of seeing characters and objects in games that are not round. The cool thing about tessellation, is a developer can take a multiplatform game, and offer tessellation on the PC version over console. (like AVP2 and Dirt2)

Definetely Heaven benchmark gives the best example, but it does offer a bit on AvP, Metro and Dirt2.

[candle_86]

I wouldn't be counting on ports that are direct ports anymore. Remember the hardware in consoles is from 2005. We are now at a place where it makes sense to devolpe for PC for the game compaines, because the next gen consoles will be using our technology so they want to get there hands into the code and test it out on our hardware, always happens this way.

Originally Posted by Bearclaw

...kevpla.

[LydianKnight]

Originally Posted by mailman2

publishers are greedy scumbags and they'd rather put out a console game for $60.

Amen! +200

[Gaco]

Putting Nvidia and ATi in the same booth now isn't fair. Nvidia has always priced their good performing cards very high. ATi has done much in recent years to get acceptable gaming graphicscards down to affordable levels, as much as 2/3 of the typical price level set by Nvidia. I think decent PC gaming has gone from expensive to much more affordable in the recent years.

So yeah, Nvidia hasn't done much (although they tend to push technology which I appreciate), but ATi certainly has. Even good gaming CPU's have been inexpensive since 2007'ish. Add the huge PC gaming library and much lower price pr. game than console (which you have to buy tons of accessories to nowaways anyway) and I think I've made my point. It's gone the right way the past years

[jeffmd]

Originally Posted by Logical

DX7 was awesome...DX8 was not, DX9 was awesome..DX10 was not DX11 will be awesome..

Direct X 8 rocked... I don't know wtf you are you are talking about. We got SHADERS in dx8! You know how much crap gaming would be without shaders?

What sucked was no one was able to pump out the extreme cards required to support it yet. Even at the start of dx9.. ati was producing cards with reasonable performance but nvidias geforce 5 line was pretty crap.

These days now that all cards have been brought up to DX10 spec and we are gaming in vista and windows 7 machines, its not a matter of if a card has DX11 or not. It is simply how powerful the card is. Sure, you will see new budget based cards with dx11, but will have no business running games using the new features, but otherwise the money you put into the card is not for DX10 or 11 features but raw performance. If you buy a top of the line video card, it will be dx11. If you buy a mid range card, it will be dx10 or dx11 depending on if you are buying one of the newer mid range cards, or one of the older dx10 high performers.

[candle_86]

Originally Posted by jeffmd

Direct X 8 rocked... I don't know wtf you are you are talking about. We got SHADERS in dx8! You know how much crap gaming would be without shaders?

What sucked was no one was able to pump out the extreme cards required to support it yet. Even at the start of dx9.. ati was producing cards with reasonable performance but nvidias geforce 5 line was pretty crap.

These days now that all cards have been brought up to DX10 spec and we are gaming in vista and windows 7 machines, its not a matter of if a card has DX11 or not. It is simply how powerful the card is. Sure, you will see new budget based cards with dx11, but will have no business running games using the new features, but otherwise the money you put into the card is not for DX10 or 11 features but raw performance. If you buy a top of the line video card, it will be dx11. If you buy a mid range card, it will be dx10 or dx11 depending on if you are buying one of the newer mid range cards, or one of the older dx10 high performers.

what he is refering to was the lack of support in its hayday for it.

DX7 was well supported because the diffrence in 7 and 6 is Hardware TnL and it wasnt hard to do either, a simple command call to look for Hardware TnL if not render to CPU lol. DX8 though only laster from 2001-2002, it got about a year of use and wasn't nearly as simple. DX9 titles didnt hit in force untill 2004, untill then it was largely DX7/8 games. COD1 doesnt look much better with DX9 hardware vs DX7 hardware, I played it both on an MX440 and on a 9600Pro, wasnt impressed with it. Shadows looked a little better. But FarCry and Half Life 2 started to move towards DX9 but even in those the diffrence between DX8 and DX9 is small. DX10 suffers the same issues as DX8. DX9 hardware is so commong and consoles are all DX9 that most games will rely on the DX9 code and we are just starting to see what DX9C can really do. Most of what Crysis in Ultra High does is really DX9 lol.

[jeffmd]

candle, the differences and additions between dx10 and dx11 from dx9 are fairly small when looking at the jumps in advancements between dx7-8-9. 8's largest contribution was shaders, and 9 removed alot of the size restrictions on the lines of code within a shader which made them so limiting in 8. When you consider what shaders today control, lighting, shadows, reflections, particle effects, the largest progression seen between the DX in the past 8 years is shaders, and in turn everything the way in the game is rendered. Bump and normal maps would be the second biggest change between them I would recon. The rest is underlying groundwork designed to make the code above execute faster.

This also makes it hard for an old game to look better on new hardware. Unless CoD1 was designed for many of its graphic features to take advantage of shaders, it wouldn't look much different. Even CoD2 didn't utilise much improvement on graphic card use, it was just a pretty sweet 3d engine. Half life 2 on the other hand made ample use of DX9 from the ground up, utilising textures water, complex bump mapping (normals?), soft shadows.

Crysis, alot of people like to point out that the majority of effects can be enabled in dx9, but fail to ackowledge that the effects look different, and are probably why they were removed from the final selection of selectable effects. This is a great example of how DX10 wasn't just about NEW effects, but about increased quality in lighting and shadows available to effects we could allready previously do. It also offered alot of new underlying ground work including a new way pipelines are used to increase speed.

The fact that dx10 wasn't available to xp was simply microsofts choice in not porting to the OS, it wasn't a hardware or game issue. If you consider that this was %80 of the argument for people AGAINST moving to a DX10 video card then you can see that DX10 wasn't a failure at a spec, it just had alot of bitchy people complaining about having to upgrade to vista (and any other parts of their computer to actually run vista).

DX11 looks like another GOOD step in progression, but not one that we need to run out and buy new video cards for because we have to have it (which is also good for game makers, who can make the game to use DX11 but feel safe that %95 of the game looks the same on DX10 cards.

Also one of the major points of DX11, tessellation, is not a new technology. Ati had it on their DX9 cards, and it actually worked very well. There was only one, very big, problem. Performance. We have plenty of games today that push the limits of video cards without the use of tessellation. Tessellation in nature increases the polygon count of objects thus increasing the load on the gpu further then the original game was designed for. This means that chances are high if tessellation can be used in a scene without bringing the system to its knees, the scene is already not very taxing on your gpu and thus not visually impressive to start with. (Metro is a pretty crap looking game imo, seriously, its the fallout/oblivion engine, except no out door areas. All shiney and glowy).

[snowmanwithahat]

Originally Posted by candle_86

what he is refering to was the lack of support in its hayday for it.

DX7 was well supported because the diffrence in 7 and 6 is Hardware TnL and it wasnt hard to do either, a simple command call to look for Hardware TnL if not render to CPU lol. DX8 though only laster from 2001-2002, it got about a year of use and wasn't nearly as simple. DX9 titles didnt hit in force untill 2004, untill then it was largely DX7/8 games. COD1 doesnt look much better with DX9 hardware vs DX7 hardware, I played it both on an MX440 and on a 9600Pro, wasnt impressed with it. Shadows looked a little better. But FarCry and Half Life 2 started to move towards DX9 but even in those the diffrence between DX8 and DX9 is small. DX10 suffers the same issues as DX8. DX9 hardware is so commong and consoles are all DX9 that most games will rely on the DX9 code and we are just starting to see what DX9C can really do. Most of what Crysis in Ultra High does is really DX9 lol.

The thing you largely overlook is the transition from DX8.1 to DX9.0 and the addition of SM2.0 which wasn't monumental but did pick up alot of steam once it started to get used. Also, does anyone remember how big the DX9.0c improvements were? Just those small steps were huge improvements in some games as far as detail is concerned. I really think we're way overdue for another dx9.0c...

[XDanger]

Originally Posted by jAkUp

Personally I think tessellation is pretty cool, I am pretty tired of seeing characters and objects in games that are not round.

+1

Its my main bugbear with teh graphics

I asked the question a few months ago Will it be able to draw circles?? and got a sort of negative
,but tessellation seems like it will do the trick thank you very much.

NO MORE HEXAGONS PLEASE!!!
Unless you are rendering a pencil.

[Noriega]

Tessellation is cool but NV and ATI needs to do something to make developers really use DX11 feauteres. We got technology, we have hardware but we don't have AA titles to promote it. We really need to focus on getting more AA PC exclusives. Most developers prefer to make ****ty game and than port it to PC.