DirectX11 – the revolution?
DirectX10 was a very interesting update to the all-important DirectX API. It was a complete rethink and rewrite of the DX environment, filled with useful code optimisations which made it far easier for developers to produce games with even more stunning visual effects than ever before. It was, in short, an absolutely critical release.
Yet, largely, it flopped. For a couple of reasons.
Primarily, DX10 made very little impact as it was intrinsically linked to Windows Vista, an OS which gamers in particular didn’t ever adopt, preferring to stay on XP which was more stable and less resource-hungry, but couldn’t scale beyond the ancient DX9 API.
But apart from the gamers themselves and despite the DX10 modifications being primarily developer-oriented, games creators also failed to pick up the “new standard” with any gusto. Even Microsoft themselves, who had promised extensive DX10 content in its famous Flight Simulator X title, took months to actually release the content, and the belated release of this patch seemed to speak volumes of the company’s faith in its own new API.
Now however Vista is as dead as the veritable Dodo. And DX10 it appears very much died with it. Now Windows 7 is the global OS of choice, and with the release of ATI 5000-series Radeon GPUs, and even more recently Nvidia’s latest 400-series, DX11 is coming into the market with a healthy amount of force behind it.
But is it the API that everyone has been waiting for? Is it all that DX10 was meant to be, and more? Or is it merely a redressing of this unsuccessful release for the new OS environment?
Well, in very much the same way in which Windows 7 is basically the Vista that Vista should have been, DX11 is really DX10, with a few new features thrown in for easier and better implementation of new hardware acceleration capabilities and more realistic visual effects, like hardware tessellation for instance which you can expect to see making rough textures like cobblestone paths looking absolutely fantastic in more and more titles.
There’s also a new DirectCompute element in DX11, which allows developers greater access to the hardware capabilities of your GPU than ever before. Complex operations can be offloaded to this powerful processor to ease the load on your CPU and system RAM, which is no longer merely a 3D renderer but the integral third tier of a multi-threaded, multi-processor modern system.
Under the hood, DX11 is really mostly about the codepath optimisations which DX10 so spectacularly failed to introduce. Not that the optimisations themselves didn’t work in DX10, as you can tell by the performance of the lightly modified DX11 API. Run a DX11 game (Aliens versus Predator) on a DX11 card (Radeon 5870 in our case, Nvidia’s hasn’t hit our shores yet due to global shortages) with all the beautification effects turned on, and your game will actually run slower than if you just ran the DX10 codepath.
But the image quality will be noticeably enhanced.
Cut the post-processing down to the same levels as the DX10 version is capable of, that is turn off the new hardware-accelerated effects, and you’ll see a healthy framerate boost indicating that the DX11 codepath optimisations alone are worth the free upgrade to the newer API, if you have a latest-generation GPU in your system already.
All of this really just goes to highlight a key point. Your product and its capabilities barely matter anymore. It’s far more about getting the market to buy-in to your scheme – giving them the tools and platform to capitalise on its abilities – which defines the adoption of new tech developments today.
I expect DX11 will gain widespread adoption, basically as quickly as punters can get their hands on DX11-capable hardware, already available at mainstream prices from ATI at least. Which could be just the shot in the arm this struggling GPU-builder no doubt hopes, giving them a jump over their powerful competition Nvidia which still only has DX11 on boards priced firmly in the high-end.
Direct X11 << discussion
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