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Dx 11
- Thread starter bobuk
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 25 Sep 2009
- Posts
- 10,244
- Location
- Billericay, UK
It's all to do with how the DX11 software rendering is handled tessellation on video cards. AMD has a dedicated tessellator processor chip on there cards (and have done for years) whereas Nvidia didn't support tessellation until April last year and completely redesigned there architecture at the same time.
I'm not sure why older AMD cards can't support DX11 as older cards have had a tessellator for years now I guess the cards just aren't powerful enough to run DX11 games and if the enabled support on 4000 series cards people wouldn't bother upgrading. As for Nvidia/Geforce cards it's a different ball game it wasn't until the 400 series came out that there cards could support tessellation. On the top GTX480 model there's 4 SM's per GPC and 4 GPC's per chip and 1 SM per GPC was dedicated to rendering tessellation. The 400 Geforce series was a brand new architecture and one that was designed to give maximum performance to render DX11 effects. So with Nvidia they can't retro fix older cards to render DX11 even if it is software as they way it's rendered currently is designed for currant hardware designs.
The bottom line is taking aside all the technical goop they want as many new features on the newest hardware to get you to upgrade. If AMD and Nvidia made DX11 possible on GTX200 and 4000 series cards then you and I might hold back a year before upgrading again.