What Does it Mean in Real Life: No DirectX 11 Support

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aviat72

Limp Gawd
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Dec 19, 2010
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I am a noob when it comes to gaming driven cards but I have seen some good deals on the 48xx series cards which do not support DirectX 11.

What I wanted to understand is what it means in practice.

I will most likely use the card for strategy games like Civilization, racing games like Dirt, Flight Simulator, and maybe perhaps Hawx type games. No FPS and other shooting games since the rig will be viewable by young kids.
 
as of right now you don't lose all that much. the only game that really pushes dx11 features is BF3. some of the other games have small dx11 features. but going into the next year and what BF3 was able to show DX11 can do it should hopefully get better. do you need a dx11 card to get the best gaming experience? heck no.. i'm still sporting 2 8800GT's in SLI(ignore the signature below i'm to lazy to update it)
 
Nothing. You might lose some minor details but it will be hard to notice.
 
Since someone already mentioned that BF3 will suffer I will add that AMD does not have any drivers for crossfire support for the 4000 series graphics to be used with Skyrim. They only made support for 5000 and 6000 cards. This could indicate that going forward they won't write 4000 series xfire drivers for any new game.
 
Sprung said:
Since someone already mentioned that BF3 will suffer I will add that AMD does not have any drivers for crossfire support for the 4000 series graphics to be used with Skyrim. They only made support for 5000 and 6000 cards. This could indicate that going forward they won't write 4000 series xfire drivers for any new game.
Click to expand...

Does it matter if there's no profile or not working profile for X-fire ? :D
 
To answer this question it is important to understand exactly how DirectX11 works and how it handles backward compatibility with older hardware.

When you launch a DirectX11 game, it will make a quick determination regarding which Feature Level your card supports after which the game will run normally.

featurelevels.png


DirectX11 is a strict Super-Set of DirectX10 and 10.1, so compatibility is as simple as shedding the features that are not supported.

The important thing to understand is that most DirectX11 games will still run in DirectX11 even on DirectX10 and 10.1 hardware (Via the use of the appropriate feature level/ downlevel path). You will miss a few DX11 hardware specific features such as Tessellation but on the flip side there are a ton of API-side improvements in DX11 that are NOT hardware specific and you benifit from all of those improvements even with older hardware.

Running DX11 games on DX10.1 hardware is really not a bad spot to be. When DX10.1 came out, it included a number of hardware side improvements that were ultimately never utilized; since Nvidia skipped 10.1, so did most game developers. BUT, when running in DX11, there are separate feature levels / downlevel paths for DX10 and DX10.1 hardware. So in a DX11 game you're finally making full use of your 10.1 hardware via the 10.1 feature level moreso than when playing a regular DX10 game!

Tessellation being the only real noticeable feature you would miss when using 10.1 hardware, here is an example of what to expect. From the game Metro2033:

Tessellation Enabled:
tesson.png


Tessellation Disabled:
tessoff.png


I hope this has been of some help. My 2x 4870x2 in Quad CF works amazing in every game I play including recent games such as BF3 and Shogun2: Total War as well as older games such a World of Warcraft. There are very few games that have crossfire problems, and when you include the number that work with at least 2 GPUs the number of games that don't work falls to Zero.

Revdarian said:
DX11 is actually more efficient even when not adding effects, look up tom's hardware take on WoW as an example.
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It's a good thing then that WoW will run in DX11 just fine on 48xx hardware. I run WoW in DX11 even on a 9800GT.
 
My 4890 ran with the DX11 api just fine...it will run, but without tessallation, etc..
 
Thanks, all especially GotNoRice.

For a casual noob gamer like me this hardly makes a difference. FPS' are anyway no-go-zone for me. I basically want to fly some aeroplanes, drive some cars and rule the world. If I can do it across three monitors it would be even nicer ;).

I have a 6870 on order right now but am wondering whether to do something else. The good thing about the 6870 is the ability to drive 4 monitors which is important for me on the non-gaming side.
 
BTW can I put a 6870 and a 5430 on the same motherboard (no crossfire/eyefinity), just to drive more monitors.
 
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