Tuesday, July 22nd 2008
Microsoft DirectX 11 Details Emerge
Microsoft has released a handful of details about DirectX 11, the latest version of the company's API.
Source:
Shacknews
- Full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows
- Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
- New compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
- Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines
- Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close
41 Comments on Microsoft DirectX 11 Details Emerge
good thing we will not have to throw away our dx10 cards :)
Just my 2 cents.
Tesselation rocks, turns 1 polygon into about 1300. That's why the 360 looks so good despite the fact it's running on a GPU roughly equivalent to an ridiculously underclocked 2900.
Heheh, but currently, only ATi cards have tessellation support ;)
You can create graphics like...I dunno, take the Crytek engine. If that supported tessellation you could get graphics as good as that that would run on a GPU 1/3 as powerful.
Lets say, 4850 is X1950PRO and 4650 is X1650XT.
Also XBox 360 has the ability to use tesselation but no game has used it (AFAIK) and I highly doubt it will ever do. Basically it lacks the power. It could take an HL2 model and make it look as smooth as one on Crysis, but IMO you wouldn't save up a lot of power and definately you could not add as much details. As of now I don't know of any real time algorithm that can add detail to a simple model, kind of like like parallax mapping would do, or the displacement maps on CAD programs. (If anyone knows of one please link.) Until then it doesn't make sense to use tesselation on low detail (<20000 polys) models. It's more a feature to use on Crysis like models and make them look like real.
Tessellation would be used on round objects or curved objects wouldn't it? It's not like everything on the screen needs to be rendered that way...