DirectX 10 & the Future of Gaming

Brent_Justice said:
Why would that do that? What would the benefit be?
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You're right, why would Microsoft even care about us who purchased their previous products? They want our money, not our loyalty.

Sooner, or later we're eventually all going to end up w/running Vista, or the next version after that, all except for the Linux and Apple people of course. :D
 
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
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My GUESS is that we will see DX10 cards before Vista, like this year. There is precedent for this, remember the 9700? It supported Shader Model 2.0 before DX9 was out and had no trouble with DX8 games.
 
TruthInRuin said:
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?
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With less object overhead game content developers can stick more unique objects in there. CPUs will still be important in gaming, but as the GPU evolves it will be able to take on more tasks the CPU did before for gaming.
 
Brent_Justice said:
With less object overhead game content developers can stick more unique objects in there. CPUs will still be important in gaming, but as the GPU evolves it will be able to take on more tasks the CPU did before for gaming.
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So basically, for now cpu's maintain the same importance? I was kind of looking forward to allocating some of my processor money to my video card money. sigh.
 
TruthInRuin said:
So basically, for now cpu's maintain the same importance? I was kind of looking forward to allocating some of my processor money to my video card money. sigh.
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They'll have a slightly less importance. A good chunk of D3D10 was designed with less CPU load in mind, and you'll see this take place in both games that use D3D9Ex and on games that really exploit D3D10.
 
The big thing about D3D10 is that it is moving the burden over to one of pure GPU performance, that will be the deciding factor now for everything. You see before D3D had to check the caps to see what features the GPU supported and so forth. Now with D3D10 if it is a D3D10 GPU they will all suppor the same thing, the only difference will be performance scaling up and down the price ranges.
 
great article... i actually read that one instead of scanning over it or clicking over to "conclusions."

anyways... i think Crysis is gonna be one killer app... now only if Epic would make a UT version based on D3D10... =O

so anyone wanna take a stab at specs with estimated prices?
 
Nice article guys. I think now some can see more clearly why ATI was talking about PPU so early. As they do have a large lead on NV as far as priority information goes MS concerning DX 10 . ATI was given this information because they had to create the R500 cpu for MS. MS and Nv parted company on bad terms. One poster suggested that NV was given this same info as ATI @ the same time I would like very much to see a link on that.

After R 500 was completed . Than and only than was Nv provided the same information as thats the law.

As the auther stated ATI and MS are working hard together on DX10

I found the article interesting but a little disappointed that some things were omitted.

Such as OGL will not run in DX10 mode only DX9L mode and the fact that neither ati or NV will be able to optimize for certain games.

I still find it hard to believe people keep saying no DX10 games will be available @ launch . As the article said games from Xbox 360 will be easily ported to DX10.

Even tho Xbox 360 is not DX10 it does contain many DX10 components.

Its very strange times were coming into . NV has alined itself with its allies IBM and sony with cell.

Ati alined its self with MS and intel the core Arch OoO

Cell in the long run will no doubt win . But the real problem I see is cell is hard to write to . If you look at intels Itanic no one wanted to write apps for it. Its going to be an interesting next 5 years to say the least. .
 
Cypher19 - im not going to quote him since it would take half the page.

your partially right, or im asuming so, baised on the little info i have, Direct X 10 (and yes i am calling IT direct X 10) does infact include Direct 3D 10, even if Direct Draw and other such non-3D parts of the Direct X next generation are still in the development stage or even pre-development stages, they are part, as a whole, of Direct X 10. Microsoft is going to call the next batch (Direct 3d 10, Direct (2D) 10, Direct W/E 10) as a group, Direct X 10, so quitcher belly achen!

Secondly, i dont understand this architecture. if all three of your essential (Geometry Texture and Shader) Processers can be covered by one unified processer, some transistors have to be going to waste (under direct X 10 architecture). or can someone explain, without taking three pages how that works?

Finally, I do not believe ATI has that big a leg-up on Nvidia, in terms of next gen consoles, I think it was a poor choice of Nvidia to partner with Sony to make the PS3, as Microsoft is the big technological cash cow. however they did it, and something is delaying the PS3, and its either:
a wicked sick form of SLI
a new form of architecture (quite possibly unified)
marketing smoking too much crack.... (again)
so there will be lessions learned from the PS3, and i doubt Nvidia will ever allowed them selves to be caught with there nickers down like they were with the 7800GTX 512. somthing has to have (or better have been) learned from the PS3, even if its just that SONY has the best crack.

and just on a final note, games already take ages to produce, in teams, its a real time saver to be able to copy the geometry of a _____ and change the texture to it. it had to of saved them time, i think Direct X 10 is going to force companies like EA to hire much bigger teams and significantly increase production time.

(note i like sony, cool company, many of there technologies were just produced in to fast succession to make an impact on their market... to bad soo many things really coulda caught on.

sorry something else to add

$BangforThe$ said:
Nice article guys. I think now some can see more clearly why ATI was talking about PPU so early. As they do have a large lead on NV as far as priority information goes MS concerning DX 10 . ATI was given this information because they had to create the R500 cpu for MS. MS and Nv parted company on bad terms. One poster suggested that NV was given this same info as ATI @ the same time I would like very much to see a link on that.

After R 500 was completed . Than and only than was Nv provided the same information as thats the law.

As the auther stated ATI and MS are working hard together on DX10
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didnt quite catch all of that, and im asuming by "R500 CPU" you mean R500 GPU.

ok, Nvidia and Microsoft parted on bad terms. where did you get that from? when had they ever signed with each other?

and also if i was the CEO of microsoft i would be pissed at ATI right now. "WHATS THIS ABOUT A HEAT PROBLEM?!" SiS wouldnt get a warm welcome either (sis did the chipset for the Xbox)

and thats another thing to... if they really wanted a unified shader architecture... wouldnt they use the Xpress chipset so as to make sure full fluency within the Xbox 360? i donno, i dont get consol architecture, all i know is im getting the Wii (AKA revolution)
 
THe R500 isn't running hot its the 3 IBM cpu's that are heating every thing up.

NV built the gpu for the xbox1 and they gouged ms on it they did not part company on friendly terms.

Games will be easier to write for DX10 not harder. Some games have already been in the making for dx10 for over a year . developers did not need to have the kits to start the art work for the games. Now they have the kits. I bought the 9700pro when it was released . DX9 hadn't even been released yet. It was amazing how fast the games came out for DX9. Yes I did mean GPU not cpu. LOL
 
Mr wizard have you read anything about ps3 at all. its basicly using the G71 cpu along with cell. the reason its delayed is cell is hard to write to 7 cell processors.
 
the reason its delayed is due to the products just recently being poop'd about by IBM and who ever is producing the Blu-Ray drive (NEC??)

MS not giving info to NV is like shooting themselves in the foot, ATi and NV both share pretty much exactly the same market share with their video cards, there is no reason MS would stomp on the shoes of NV if it ment them getting more support out for their new product

i loved the article, too bad there was no interviews in there, those are always the best for me to read
 
Nice article folks lots of good info..


Hey Brent, in your list of DX10 games that your looking forward too...no Halo2 on your list? Or is it been there done that via the xbox? :p
 
Ok-I'm confused. So there is no way Microsoft can update Win XP to support Direct X 10? or they just want u to buy Vista and are purposely not allowing DirectX 10 in XP?
 
Very nice and easy to understand article.

I found an error early in the article, looks like a missing word between "years" and "the".
The word "since" was probably meant to be there.

"Here we are in 2006, four years since DirectX 9 has been released and two years the introduction of Shader Model 3.0 hardware."

I am even more sure of my upgrade path now!

After Vista is released purchase:
Windows Vista
AM2 mulit core CPU
Cross Fire AM2 motherboard (probably ASUS or DFI)
Low latency DDR2-1000 (OCZ, Corsair or Geil)
2 x High End ATI graphics cards that are fully HDCP compliant and DX10 compliant
High wattage modular PSU from Enermax (currently 620 Watt Liberty)
New case
Lots of kick ass water cooling stuff from Danger Den
and of course Crysis and other kick ass FPSs

I will probably need some adult diapers for when I play a DX10 game for the first time
and I will need some tape for my broken wallet as well! :D
 
$BangforThe$ said:
NV built the gpu for the xbox1 and they gouged ms on it they did not part company on friendly terms.
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For that matter they still are gouging them on the Xbox 360. Don’t they have to pay a royalty to Nvidia for backward compatibility on every Xbox 360? I remember reading this.

So heres my main question. I did a quick search for windows vista game benchmark, and came up pretty much empty handed. Is windows Vista's increased overhead going to constrain performance. So for the same hardware playing a DX9 game will I have better performance in XP vs Vista?

I reference Windows 98 vs 2000. I remember when 2000 came out. All the benchmarks showed 98 benchmarking faster. So are we going to have that 1 year or more lag in performance to the new operating system while all the drivers, bugs, hardware get's to a point where the difference vista makes is negligible on performance?

If anyone has any links with comparisons on performance I would be interested.

Dual boot anyone?
 
Awesome read staff, one of the best I read so far... Crysis, I think is slated for early next year which would mean right after Vista launch... you Crysis will be the main reason you will want to upgrade :D
 
Diseaseboy said:
Ok-I'm confused. So there is no way Microsoft can update Win XP to support Direct X 10? or they just want u to buy Vista and are purposely not allowing DirectX 10 in XP?
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Yes, there is virtually no feasible way. The technology is just too tied to Vista for it to be ported back to XP. It's not because

Direct X 10 (and yes i am calling IT direct X 10) does infact include Direct 3D 10, even if Direct Draw and other such non-3D parts of the Direct X next generation are still in the development stage or even pre-development stages, they are part, as a whole, of Direct X 10. Microsoft is going to call the next batch (Direct 3d 10, Direct (2D) 10, Direct W/E 10) as a group, Direct X 10, so quitcher belly achen!
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But they AREN'T in the development stage or pre-development stages. Direct3D is the ONLY one that's getting an update, and it's Microsoft themselves that are encouraging the usage of "Direct3D10" over "DirectX10". DirectX has changed a lot over the last couple years, with significant parts being phased out. DirectDraw was wrapped into Direct3D in DirectX 8 and is now basically gone (in fact, D3D9 right now can do everything DD can do, except much faster). DirectPlay is strongly discouraged (and in the DXSDK, is basically gone) for security reasons, and Windows' networking system is recommended. DirectInput is discouraged for performance reasons, and Windows messages are recommended (DI can still be used for joystick stuff though). DirectSound and DirectMusic have been rolled into DirectSound. So all that's left of DirectX 9 is Direct3D, DirectInput, and DirectSound. Of those three, the only one that MS updating to version 10 is Direct3D10. DI and DS are NOT getting updates, since DI is, as I said, discouraged and DS doesn't require much more functionality.

ok, Nvidia and Microsoft parted on bad terms. where did you get that from? when had they ever signed with each other?
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I don't have a link on it personally, but MS got kind of pissy at NV over how the graphics chip in Xbox was handled. I don't know the details very much, though. Regardless of that, ATi and NV have always had the exact same information on Direct3D10, and MS in fact worked with them a bit to decide what the D3D10 spec was going to be. MS didn't just go "Okay guys, we just made a whole new API, and we want you to have graphics cards that use this innn....2 years. gl hf gg!".

Secondly, i dont understand this architecture. if all three of your essential (Geometry Texture and Shader) Processers can be covered by one unified processer, some transistors have to be going to waste (under direct X 10 architecture). or can someone explain, without taking three pages how that works?
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The transistors wouldn't go to waste. The VS, PS, and GS can all run the same instructions in the same way, and with a unified shader architecture, would run through the same ALUs and such. Basically, one of those ALUs just gets an instruction, processes it, change a register or two, and then gets the next instruction, without much discrimination based on the mode it's in. The only time that the shader mode matters (with a couple exceptions in the GS, which I won't get into) is where and how the data is used after all of the instructions are processed.
 
Jbirney said:
Nice article folks lots of good info..


Hey Brent, in your list of DX10 games that your looking forward too...no Halo2 on your list? Or is it been there done that via the xbox? :p
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Huh? Is Halo 2 coming for the PC?
 
Brent_Justice said:
Whoa, didn't know that, DX10?
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It'll likely use D3D10, but exclusively? Probably not. By the time it's released, I highly doubt that D3D10 GPUs will have a wide enough market share to justify it.
 
Before a product has market share it has to be sold. Ms has to sell Vista for it to gain market share. ATI and NV are spending millions on preparing WGF 2.0 cards,

Brent and Kyle will do reviews along with the other sites. There will be games to play .

It will hopefully get rave reviews, Sure I won't be the only one buying. As stated in the Article .9700 pro was released befor the dx9 release . It didn't take long for DX9 games to hit the streets at all. My glass is half-full
 
This is really pissing me off. I purchased MCE 2005 this last year and now I find out I have to purchase Vista in order to watch HD-DVD or Blu-Ray in high def mode, I need Windows Vista to support cable cards, I need Windows Vista to support DX10 now. When will this end? I am going to hold out as long as possible but I am starting to think I would rather switch to MacOS X than to Windows Vista. Tech companies are really pissing me off.
 
First, great article, some nice info.

I imagine MS is going to be pimping Vista pretty hard, they need to explain WHY you need an upgrade, this segregation of DX10 to a vista environment sounds like a key element.

I'm also curious about Vistas backward compatibility, how will my current games work on Vista (will they work at all?).
I think MS will launch a killer gaming app with Vista in order to get the enthusiast crowd to run out and buy it.

These days, many of MS's advances are purely based on piracy reduction efforts and I ihave no doubt that Vista will be (at least) a linear advance in that direction, which leaves me asking a few questions about security and END USER licenses that we have to agree to for Vista.

I can tell you, it'll be hard to pitch this OS, since XP left people wanting very little. So unless MS can make a compelling case IN RETAIL with all the major review sites backing them, Vista is pretty dead in the water.

How many buisiness users will really benefit from a complete system overhaul? for a 3d interface and 64bit computing environment? how many offices do you think really need that?

So all in all Im a bit skeptic about what Vista is really bringing to the table, as far as a 64bit workspace, XP64 did very little to entice users (not to mention support is lacking by major companies) to hop on. Let's just sit back and see if this cash cow will bring some actual profits to the END USERS.....

:rolleyes:
 
Cypher19 said:
It'll likely use D3D10, but exclusively? Probably not. By the time it's released, I highly doubt that D3D10 GPUs will have a wide enough market share to justify it.
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I'm going to assume you mean that they are going to support two versions of directx 9/10 (of course 9.0L) isn't it just as feasable they use directx 10 fully, and compatible, not compliant cards can still run the game.. but like shit. They could then have ways to turn off some of the fancier effects that cannot be done on the hardware of the directx 9 cards and at least make the game playable.. if even at shitty low resolutions?

I might of missed your point, and I'm not a programmer at all, I don't know how wide the differences between programming for directx 9 and 10 are. It sounds a lot different, and I wonder how much extra time (not that they don't have plenty with all the vista delays ;)) in development it would take to do this.

Games like COD 2 support both directx 7 and 9, and I wondered if it took much effort. I know its based on a hugely upgraded Quake 3 engine. I don't know all the details so I will stop here. Sorry if I am off-topic.
 
Brent_Justice said:
The big thing about D3D10 is that it is moving the burden over to one of pure GPU performance, that will be the deciding factor now for everything. You see before D3D had to check the caps to see what features the GPU supported and so forth. Now with D3D10 if it is a D3D10 GPU they will all suppor the same thing, the only difference will be performance scaling up and down the price ranges.
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Brent this is the whole key to vista for gamers. I have never seen it said better than you laid it out right here.
 
moetop said:
Dual boot anyone?
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I could have sworn somewhere I read that Vista wasn't going to allow dual booting. Dang it, I wish I could remember where I read that. Inq? Register? C|Net? Maybe I was confusing that with Vista/MacOSX dual-booting.

Either way, it certainly looks like plenty of us are going to go the dual-boot route when Vista/DX10 hits. It reminds me of the DOS/Win95 days.
 
With less object overhead game content developers can stick more unique objects in there. CPUs will still be important in gaming, but as the GPU evolves it will be able to take on more tasks the CPU did before for gaming.
Click to expand...

Thats what I'm wondering... I just got sold on the concept of a separate PPU, and now the UA makes a separate PPU seem sort fo redundant.
I wonder how this will effect game development. The physics card people better pull some killer apps out of a hat or they will be completely obsoleted by DX10.


How many buisiness users will really benefit from a complete system overhaul? for a 3d interface and 64bit computing environment? how many offices do you think really need that?
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True, true, but you forget how slowly businesses took up XP for desktops. Basically, once computers wore out, they were replaced with XP machines. I expect the Vista uptake to work out the same way, only a little slower.

-Dr.K
 
Points for those who still seem confused:


To those who ask why XP can't be updated to run DX10, they've been working hard on just such a little update... IT'S CALLED VISTA! The whole reason the wonders of DX10 are possible is that Vista rewrites the display system of Windows from the ground up, ditching the GDI system completely. You might as well ask why DOS 3.3 can't be updated to do pre-emptive multitasking.

For those who are getting snarky about not having DX9L on XP, and even snarkier about Brent asking what would be the point, you don't understand what the purpose of it is--it doesn't add new features or anything, it's a port of DX9 to the new graphics subsystem of Vista to make it possible to run DX9 software under Vista. It's like an emulator for XP-style graphics. So Brent's question of "what would be the point" means, why run an emulator of XP's DX9 on XP? XP already runs DX9 natively!

To shift gears, here's my thoughts on why Vista will be worth it: I read an article last year about the changes in the development process for Windows that produced Vista. I've been complaining for years about the slipshod, haphazard, patch/kludge/spaghetti code design of Windows, with one layer of spackle slapped on after another. My gripe boiled down to, Microsoft is the richest, most powerful software company in the world--why can't they use that power to stop the madness, start over, and build something clean from the ground up? It's not like they would lose ground to their competitors--they have destroyed their competitors!

Well, this article told the story of how Jim Allchin walked into Gates' office and said that if they DIDN'T start with a clean slate, Vista would never succeed. And Gates went along with it. They decided to build Vista in clean, structured, well-tested pieces designed to conform to a strict overall vision and strategy, instead of having a mish-mash of independent groups spewing out crap code and having to patch it together with duct tape. That was a while back, and maybe they didn't succeed in following through on their intentions. BUT, the design of DX10 sounds like EXACTLY the kind of clean, logical result that such a process would produce, so maybe it's working. It would certainly explain the delays--I mean, Allchin basically pulled a Carmack, "It will ship when it's done" kind of thing here.

Look, I'm no MS fan--I kept on using my Amigas until the bitter end, and if you think Mac fans see Gates as the devil, you oughta try Amigans. But if Vista has really been built the way that article described, I think everyone is in for a surprise at just how slick, stable, and agile it will be. Thank the maker that Allchin saw his impending retirement and decided to spend all his chips on doing it right for once. And let's face it, who really decided to go the bottom-line-first approach on the previous versions of Windows? Hmmm, that would take someone ruthless, arrogant, amoral, a corporate cutthroat bully with a heart of stone... does that sound like Allchin, or more like.... Ballmer?

My two cents...
 
First of all, kudos to Commander Suzdal for giving a lot of people food for thought. Get a plate!

=====

Am I the only person who thinks that DirectX 10* - and particularly this unified shader architecture - sounds the death knell for Ageia's PhysX card before it ever really comes out?

Still and all though, it's a very interesting article and DX10 has a lot of paper potential. I sincerely hope that this potential is realized in terms of actual graphic quality; otherwise, there's not going to be any inclination for people to get into that expensive upgrade path.


* Yeah, only Direct3D got the updates; I'm calling it DX10 for simplicity's sake and to minimize confusion.
 
Sqube said:
Am I the only person who thinks that DirectX 10* - and particularly this unified shader architecture - sounds the death knell for Ageia's PhysX card before it ever really comes out?
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You're not the only person thinking this, but everyone seems to be ignoring the current trend in the gaming industry:

Your graphics card can't fully cope with games that are already released when it is. FEAR, Oblivion - neither of them can be run truly silky with the previous generation of graphics cards that were prevalent during their design, and this generation has trouble running them silky smooth as well.

With the idea that GPUs will take on more non-graphics roles within games, it seems like people are expecting them to magically grow GFLOPs to cope - as it is GPUs are the bottleneck, and SLi/XF is the only way to get past that.

So this really begs the question - Why bother with a graphics card that can do all this extra junk if, in order to do it, it has to sacrifice a good portion of its rendering power? Buy two cards like Big Green and Red are wont to push these days?

Even if that was the case, if I spent that much on 2 graphics cards I'd damn well want a ridiculously sublime and immersive experience with no tearing or shortcut rendering - so, not a GPU pretending to be an over-priced, inefficient game function accelerator sitting next to my poor maxed out GPU focusing on graphics.

Finally, none of these 'extra function' acceleration features are supported by D3D10 as it stands. This seems to be ATi's view on the future, but I don't see an API for physics or AI being on the list of features being developed by microsoft for anything before DX11 - which is a long way away considering DX10 isn't even here yet.

PPU's aren't dead yet, not by a long shot.
 
Commander Suzdal said:
My two cents...
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Sorry to be the one wearing the TinFoil hat, but seeing is believing, and till that great day arrives we just have hot air and hype. And I don't know about you, but till MS launched XP, they really had no credibility in my book.
I'm also thinking if Vista is purely .Net turf it will be a lot more bloated then todays OS, so more power will obviously be required.
Keep in mind that the number of new games and apps that will justify this upgrade has to be killer, since basically min specs for comfortable usage will be high above average joe turf.

You can look at it another way, game developers already have a hard time with todays pleothora of visual possibiliites and demanding time schedules, so more options doesn't necesarilly lead to better quality....
Oh hell, this could take forever. When Vista launches, we'll talk....
 
Brent_Justice said:
Whoa, didn't know that, DX10?
Click to expand...


Oh gosh I am sorry Brent as I thought you knew that and did not have Halo2 on your list because you have played it on the xbox already. But yea supposedly it will be for Vista/DX10 only to take advatnage of all the new stuff.... guess we will have to wait and see...
 
Commander Suzdal said:
To shift gears, here's my thoughts on why Vista will be worth it: I read an article last year about the changes in the development process for Windows that produced Vista. I've been complaining for years about the slipshod, haphazard, patch/kludge/spaghetti code design of Windows, with one layer of spackle slapped on after another. My gripe boiled down to, Microsoft is the richest, most powerful software company in the world--why can't they use that power to stop the madness, start over, and build something clean from the ground up? It's not like they would lose ground to their competitors--they have destroyed their competitors!

Well, this article told the story of how Jim Allchin walked into Gates' office and said that if they DIDN'T start with a clean slate, Vista would never succeed. And Gates went along with it. They decided to build Vista in clean, structured, well-tested pieces designed to conform to a strict overall vision and strategy, instead of having a mish-mash of independent groups spewing out crap code and having to patch it together with duct tape. That was a while back, and maybe they didn't succeed in following through on their intentions. BUT, the design of DX10 sounds like EXACTLY the kind of clean, logical result that such a process would produce, so maybe it's working. It would certainly explain the delays--I mean, Allchin basically pulled a Carmack, "It will ship when it's done" kind of thing here.
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Vista is being built upon the Windows 2003 Server core or kernal from what I read. It's not being started from scatch, though they might of started it out that way. They did tried using the XP Pro core, which is still based on the old NT kernal, and that didn't work out.

I don't know the history of Windows 2003 Server, but when set up to run in the workstation mode, it runs noticiable faster than XP Pro from my experience in using Microsoft's trial version. If it were affordable, I'd be using it now. Windows XP x64 is also built upon the 64 bit version of Windows 2003.
 
I'm sure we'll all shift to Vista over time as our hw is upgraded to be compatible with it. The main reason I can see for most gamers shifting faster is fps - if vista can run existing DX9 games 20% faster on the same hw then we'll all be using it sooner rather then later.
 
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