DirectX 10 & the Future of Gaming

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,624
DirectX 10 & the Future of Gaming - What will the benefits of DirectX 10 and a Unified Architecture be to gamers? What possibilities will there be with the future of gaming? We recently sat down with ATI to talk about DX10 and the possibilities with their next generation desktop GPU.


With less overhead the execution time is reduced. Currently with DirectX 9 for the most part, the API+Driver can take up to 40% of execution time. With DIRECTX 10 this is reduced in half allowing more time for the Game/Application. What this means is that the game content developer can insert more unique objects into their games creating a more immersive experience.
Click to expand...
 
Nice article.

Makes me wonder if the new computers they are selling now will actually be "Vista Compatible". I guess they are, but I think that they will not be able to take advantage of DX10.

I have seen this "Vista Compatible" sticker on all the new Pcs and I smerk to myself yeah ok... :confused: what about DX10?
 
Another reason games should be made in opengl. Who really wants to upgrade to vista, I dont. I would rather have more opengl games, opengl is also going to release an update sooner or later supporting the same crap(and yes I am talking about the geometry shader). If you want to know more I would use google.
 
sc3252 said:
Another reason games should be made in opengl. Who really wants to upgrade to vista, I dont. I would rather have more opengl games, opengl is also going to release an update sooner or later supporting the same crap(and yes I am talking about the geometry shader). If you want to know more I would use google.
Click to expand...

I have to agree. Multiplatform = good, proprietary = bad. If OpenGL were used for BF2 and Eve online, I'd have no reason to even run Windows lol.
 
JOESKURTU said:
Nice article.

Makes me wonder if the new computers they are selling now will actually be "Vista Compatible". I guess they are, but I think that they will not be able to take advantage of DX10.

I have seen this "Vista Compatible" sticker on all the new Pcs and I smerk to myself yeah ok... :confused: what about DX10?
Click to expand...

I still don't think we have gotten a complete answer on what that exactly means. You can bet that those selling now do not have DX10 video cards in them though! Will most likely probably be able to use the DX9.0L features Brent was talking about.
 
JOESKURTU said:
Nice article.

Makes me wonder if the new computers they are selling now will actually be "Vista Compatible". I guess they are, but I think that they will not be able to take advantage of DX10.

I have seen this "Vista Compatible" sticker on all the new Pcs and I smerk to myself yeah ok... :confused: what about DX10?
Click to expand...
I would imagine there's a difference between compatible and compliant...
 
Great article. Makes it pretty clear to me that DX10 is going to limp out of the gate. IMO we'll still be waiting for a DX10 "killer app" game this time next year. I'm going to resist the whole Vista release like I avoided WinME.
 
So how does nVidia feel about DX10? It looks like Microsoft gave ATi a head start and major advantage as ATi will be on it's second gen of the technology. Maybe ATi agreed to charge less for the 360 GPUs in exchange for information on DX10?

Conspiracy thoeries aside, it will be interesting to see what DX10 will bring to the table in REAL WORLD gameplay. I want to see actual gameplay footage and not a bunch of spiffy tech demos. Yes I am a very jaded gamer.

Another big question is how will DX10 interact with multicore CPUs? Will DX10 have specific code to make use of multicores or will developers be left on their own? By the end of the year I can see near $200 USD dual cores availiable for sale and three or four core CPUs at least annouced by this time next year. All this DX10 spiffy-ness will be for nothing if it has to wait for the CPU to catch up.
 
Great article Brent. Lots of exciting stuff happening for the gamer/enthusiast as of late with the PPU and DirectX 10. I cannot wait to experience it.
 
Supposedly the new Microsoft Flight Sim X (as in 10) is DX10 and is supposed to be stunning. It is the piece to show what DX10 is all about.
 
Will DX9.0L be available for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, for those of us who don't want to jump onto the Vista bandwagon right away?
 
DX10 sounds exciting. With all these new, exciting info regarding Conroe, DX10, and Vista, I think I'll have to postpone my hardware upgrade date again. :p
 
It was an okay article. Could you at least have referred to the stuff as the right names? For example, officially, there is NO SUCH THING AS DIRECTX 10. The only part of DirectX that had an upgrade was Direct3D, and hence there is only Direct3D10. Also, DirectX 9.0L should be referred to as Direct3D9Ex (or D3D9Ex).

Opengl is also going to release an update sooner or later supporting the same crap(and yes I am talking about the geometry shader).
Click to expand...

Yeah...the ARB will probably include that in OGL in, about, ohhh....2010-ish?

So how does nVidia feel about DX10? It looks like Microsoft gave ATi a head start and major advantage as ATi will be on it's second gen of the technology.
Click to expand...

It probably seems that way because ATi was the one that shared the s*lideshow with HOCP. ATi and NV are both working closely with MS on this stuff, and have been since very early on. NV simply feels that it's not yet justifiable to spend the transistor resources on a unified shader architecture, and they're probably very right. Most games nowadays are NOT vertex limited, they're fillrate and pixel shader limited, and ATi's example of a high-geom situation is not realistic in terms of games. ATi's tech will also still be first gen in terms of D3D10 compatibilty. Xenos wasn't a D3D10 chip, and is actually reasonably far from.

Another big question is how will DX10 interact with multicore CPUs? Will DX10 have specific code to make use of multicores or will developers be left on their own?
Click to expand...

I forget what MS has said about that, but I think D3D10 will be multi-thread ready out of the box. Devs will still have to specifically code for multiple cores though anyways, as a whole truckload of issues come up with threading that need to be dealt with. I'm fairly sure though that D3D10 doesn't complicate or alleviate the issue of threading much, though.

Will DX9.0L be available for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, for those of us who don't want to jump onto the Vista bandwagon right away?
Click to expand...

D3D9Ex is simply D3D9 being run through D3D10's API and the VDDM. It's not for XP at all.

Oh, and yes, it's very likely that D3D9Ex will give a performance boost if an app supports it (which requires about 10 lines of code).


On a closing note,

PLEASE, FOR ALL THAT'S GOOD IN THIS WORLD STOP CALLING IT DIRECTX 10! IT'S ONLY CALLED DIRECT3D 10!
 
JOESKURTU said:
Nice article.

Makes me wonder if the new computers they are selling now will actually be "Vista Compatible". I guess they are, but I think that they will not be able to take advantage of DX10.

I have seen this "Vista Compatible" sticker on all the new Pcs and I smerk to myself yeah ok... :confused: what about DX10?
Click to expand...

I don't see why not. All the computer will need is Vista, Vista comes with DX10. You don't need a DX10 video card to be able to use Vista. Vista comes with DX 9.0L for DX9 cards, so any exisiting DX9 card will work with Vista (provided there are drivers).
 
yevaud said:
Great article. Makes it pretty clear to me that DX10 is going to limp out of the gate. IMO we'll still be waiting for a DX10 "killer app" game this time next year. I'm going to resist the whole Vista release like I avoided WinME.
Click to expand...

There are a couple DX10 games I'm looking forward to, Crysis and Flight Sim. That's pretty much all I know for 100% sure that will be DX10.
 
Brent_Justice said:
There are a couple DX10 games I'm looking forward to, Crysis and Flight Sim. That's pretty much all I know for 100% sure that will be DX10.
Click to expand...

There's 3DMark 07/08 to look forward to. :p
 
MH Knights said:
So how does nVidia feel about DX10? It looks like Microsoft gave ATi a head start and major advantage as ATi will be on it's second gen of the technology. Maybe ATi agreed to charge less for the 360 GPUs in exchange for information on DX10?
Click to expand...

This will be ATI's first DX10 part, but 2nd gen Unified Shader part. The XBOX360 is not DX10.

Another big question is how will DX10 interact with multicore CPUs? Will DX10 have specific code to make use of multicores or will developers be left on their own? By the end of the year I can see near $200 USD dual cores availiable for sale and three or four core CPUs at least annouced by this time next year. All this DX10 spiffy-ness will be for nothing if it has to wait for the CPU to catch up.
Click to expand...

Well that was one of the major things DX10 will be better at, less CPU dependent due to less object overhead (the small batch problem noted in the article). They have reduced the overhead of the API by quite a bit since it is re-written from the ground up.
 
GoHack said:
Will DX9.0L be available for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP, for those of us who don't want to jump onto the Vista bandwagon right away?
Click to expand...

9.0L is part of Vista, not XP
 
Brent_Justice said:
9.0L is part of Vista, not XP
Click to expand...

Vista is suppose to be built upon Windows 2003, so it shouldn't be too hard to provide DX 9.0L, or D3D9Ex, which ever it's called, for at least Windows XP x64, since that OS is also based on 2003.
 
GoHack said:
Vista is suppose to be built upon Windows 2003, so it shouldn't be too hard to provide DX 9.0L, or D3D9Ex, which ever it's called, for at least Windows XP x64, since that OS is also based on 2003.
Click to expand...

Why would that do that? What would the benefit be?
 
I find it funny that direct3d's fancy OOP api is eating up execution time when the whole purpose of directx was to get windows out of the path between the programmer and the hardware.

Could some one differentiate between the geometry shader and vertex shader? Guess I'll need to do some googling...

That slide did a good job of explaining the benefits of a unified gpu setup though, now if I could only unify my piecewise post. ;o)

techenclave said:
"The traditional vertex shader takes in a single vertex, a single point, and it has to output a single vertex. It's impossible for the vertex shader to create or destroy triangles because it always has to output a vertex for each one it takes in. The geometry shader lets the game operate on entire geometry primitives, lines, triangles, and points as well as neighboring adjacent primitives. The geometry shader can also create new primitives, add new triangles, before sending them further down the pipe to the rasterizer and pixel shader.
http://www.techenclave.com/forums/preview-directx-10-a-69584.html
Click to expand...
 
Volkum said:
So they're going to 'force' us to upgrade to use it? Lame...
Click to expand...

You don't need to. D3D9Ex provides zero extra functionality on top of D3D9. It's simply D3D9 using D3D10's faster API.

I find it funny that direct3d's fancy OOP api is eating up execution time when the whole purpose of directx was to get windows out of the path between the programmer and the hardware.

Could some one differentiate between the geometry shader and vertex shader? Guess I'll need to do some googling...
Click to expand...

It's not the fact that the API is OOP-based. In fact, there's almost no performance difference between OOP and functional programming anymore. D3D9's API is slow because it wasn't designed as well as it could be, and a lot of extra work is done for what should be some very simple tasks.

Oh, and btw, the geometry shader by itself simply lets you perform operations on the entire triangle at a time, but that doesn't really give you a whole lot by itself. The power of the GS comes in with things like stream out (e.g. instead of doing complex skinning on an object once every time it has to be redrawn for alight addtion, it's calculated once for all of the passes) and generating triangles for things like seperate viewports and render targets.
 
Excelent fucking article!!

I have to say that is teh best article i have ever read on the [H]...probably because it is something I care very much about :rolleyes:

Anyways...I didnt know about the whole unified architechture (oh god spelling...) very interesting stuff indeed.

Does this mean ALL DX10 GPUs will need to be Unified Architechture? The article made it seem that that was true, but there were a few points where it didnt look so true.
 
HighwayAssassins said:
Does this mean ALL DX10 GPUs will need to be Unified Architechture? The article made it seem that that was true, but there were a few points where it didnt look so true.
Click to expand...

It's not required. It just makes sense and is more practical now. D3D10 has a unified instruction set for SM4. This means that every part of the shader can do the same parts, whereas before the VS was more capable than the PS or vice versa.
 
HighwayAssassins said:
Does this mean ALL DX10 GPUs will need to be Unified Architechture? The article made it seem that that was true, but there were a few points where it didnt look so true.
Click to expand...

Page 3

While DirectX 10 can fully utilize a unified GPU architecture, a unified GPU isn’t required to meet DirectX 10 specification. Therefore you can still have a GPU with separate vertex, geometry, and pixel units that is completely DirectX 10 capable and compliant. The key component that will need be to supported by a non-unified GPU is the new Geometry Shader that could work in a fixed pipeline architecture as shown above.
Click to expand...
 
Brent_Justice said:
Page 3
Click to expand...
my bad
rolleyes.gif


SO if a GPU is compliant, does that really mean DX10? I mean of course its supported, but i am guessing most games will prefer a unified architechture right?

Why dont we just say UA from now on?
 
Cypher19 said:
It was an okay article. Could you at least have referred to the stuff as the right names? For example, officially, there is NO SUCH THING AS DIRECTX 10. The only part of DirectX that had an upgrade was Direct3D, and hence there is only Direct3D10. Also, DirectX 9.0L should be referred to as Direct3D9Ex (or D3D9Ex).



Yeah...the ARB will probably include that in OGL in, about, ohhh....2010-ish?



It probably seems that way because ATi was the one that shared the s*lideshow with HOCP. ATi and NV are both working closely with MS on this stuff, and have been since very early on. NV simply feels that it's not yet justifiable to spend the transistor resources on a unified shader architecture, and they're probably very right. Most games nowadays are NOT vertex limited, they're fillrate and pixel shader limited, and ATi's example of a high-geom situation is not realistic in terms of games. ATi's tech will also still be first gen in terms of D3D10 compatibilty. Xenos wasn't a D3D10 chip, and is actually reasonably far from.



I forget what MS has said about that, but I think D3D10 will be multi-thread ready out of the box. Devs will still have to specifically code for multiple cores though anyways, as a whole truckload of issues come up with threading that need to be dealt with. I'm fairly sure though that D3D10 doesn't complicate or alleviate the issue of threading much, though.



D3D9Ex is simply D3D9 being run through D3D10's API and the VDDM. It's not for XP at all.

Oh, and yes, it's very likely that D3D9Ex will give a performance boost if an app supports it (which requires about 10 lines of code).


On a closing note,

PLEASE, FOR ALL THAT'S GOOD IN THIS WORLD STOP CALLING IT DIRECTX 10! IT'S ONLY CALLED DIRECT3D 10!
Click to expand...

LOL @ this guy, talk about issues.....

On topic, was a very good article, i am looking forward to vista, should be a good platform.
 
Cypher19 said:
Yeah...the ARB will probably include that in OGL in, about, ohhh....2010-ish?

PLEASE, FOR ALL THAT'S GOOD IN THIS WORLD STOP CALLING IT DIRECTX 10! IT'S ONLY CALLED DIRECT3D 10!
Click to expand...

Ouch, arb is slow for some extensions, but I believe it will be officially part of the spec shortly after hardware capability is there. (if it isnt there already? -im no EE) If it doesnt require hardware I would take a bet that it will be official before vista ;o)

If microsoft would go ahead and name directx next, 10, wgf, whatever there wouldnt be confusion, (although im afriad that they deleted everything but the V section of their approved names list, vienna cmon now.)

And I didnt say the slowdown was due to its oop design, I just said it was fancy. (although I'm not all that big of a fan of oop, but it is useful in some situations. Like when you want to camouflage a global variable in an object with appropriately slow interfacing functions.). ;o)
 
Any one wanna help me understand this?

So basically with the new API, object overhead will be drastically reduced...

Will this mean CPU's are going to become much less important in gaming? Or will the ammount of unique object decide on how fast your processor should be?
 
Quick question, will we be seeing DX10 cards before or after the release of Vista? How well do we expect a DX10 card to run DX9 games while on xp?

-wil
 
pigwalk said:
Quick question, will we be seeing DX10 cards before or after the release of Vista? How well do we expect a DX10 card to run DX9 games while on xp?

-wil
Click to expand...
I would guess at least as well as current cards. If you buy a card with UA, it can just select which pipes to give certain tasks just like current cards...therefore being at least as good.
 
I would think the next card release would be dx10 capable. Performance isnt dictated by ms's api, (although features will be) expect a normal nextgen speed bump.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top