DX10 Game Demo

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A silly thread really but hey; just installed Win7 and DX10 so i though I'd better try a dx10 game to see if I can see any difference - can anyone recommend one for me to try?
 
You won't be able to see any difference really :p. Or well, perhaps small differences but dx10 is quite rubbish:p.
 
Very few games really do much with DX10, a few soft particles, the odd water shader... the more adventurous devs poorly implement differed shader/SSAO features...
 
Do remember which many do not that dx10 was all about a faster flowing api than dx9. Nothing really improved for gfx just the speed at which it was drawn. At least thats what i remember from a few articles when dx10 was coming out. Same with dx11 but should be better for gfx but again its about speed which should be good according to some articles. Even for dx10 cards which will benefit from the code optimises.
 
The only really noticeable difference i've ever seen was actually in Bioshock. The water moved in a completely different way in DX10, instead of standard 'splash' textures appearing on the waters surface, the water actually parted as you walked through it and left a wake much like when a speedboat passes through water. Was quite cool but didn't really justify the performance hit.

SkeeterPSA said:
Do remember which many do not that dx10 was all about a faster flowing api than dx9. Nothing really improved for gfx just the speed at which it was drawn. At least thats what i remember from a few articles when dx10 was coming out.
Click to expand...

I think that was indeed the original aim of DX10 yeah, shame it completely failed though, resulting in lower performance for nearly every game that used it. The only one i knew of that actually ran more efficiently was Farcry2. DX10.1 was a step in the right direction but that seems to have been all but abandoned. Here's hoping for DX11!
 
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SkeeterPSA said:
Do remember which many do not that dx10 was all about a faster flowing api than dx9. Nothing really improved for gfx just the speed at which it was drawn. At least thats what i remember from a few articles when dx10 was coming out. Same with dx11 but should be better for gfx but again its about speed which should be good according to some articles. Even for dx10 cards which will benefit from the code optimises.
Click to expand...

This is because most of the really good features of the best features of DX10 were ripped out before release, because Nvidia failed to get hardware working that supported the "good" features of DX10 they put pressure on MS to cut them out.

Assasins creed is around 10-20% faster in dx10.1, over dx10, because most of the missing features(not all) were enabled and ATi cards could use them, that 20% speed is rumoured to be a very VERY easy performance to gain from far far more effective multithreaded coding. Remember dx9 was out way before dual core cpu's, let alone quads, dx10 was supposed help games coded better to use multithreading far far more efficiently. Game dev's are saying 15-20% should be easy, some games could get as much as 50% more performance via multithreading.

People stopped using DX10 so much and stopped putting effort in as without those performance increases, the visual extra's didn't have enough spare juice to actually be utilised. AS in, people spent time and money and effort coding for the original dx10, but after it was gutted, the time and effort was largely a waste, some persisted, some didn't. DX11 will be an entirely different story, massive performance advantages, visual upgrades, improved efficiency.

THe only real thing DX10 had was soft particles(Bioshock is a great example) in dx9 you'll see smoke for instance clip with the floor and it looks like an edge which is unrealistic, in dx10 smoke can "blend" into the floor without the edge looking more like a gas and quite a lot better, small but lots of small things add up to look much better. IT also had less overhead for each particle so you could increase the number of particles, but with the missing performance improvements you could have more particles, but really had no extra performance spare to make that feature useable.

You can bet most games out there are dx10.1 compatible and can use lots of dx11 features, but were disabled due to dx10 being butchered, we've seen this in Assasins Creed where they were pressured to remove dx10.1 by Nvidia. You can bet most TWIMTBP titles are dx10.1 and have improvements that are disabled, you can also bet the second Nvidia has a dx11 card out that dx10.1/dx11 patches will be out for things like Crysis and without question, Assasins Creed 1(and 2 by then probably).
 
You can do multi-threaded rendering in DX9 - a few games such as COD4, ETQW, etc. do it... and multi threaded GPU functionality was never coming before DX11. (Yes they may actually be using open GL in some cases - but its still the same generation feature set API).

Most of the speed up from DX10+ comes from deferred shader features, the only reason assassins creed shows performance "gains" on ATI using 10.1 RP is because they designed their architecture to handle sampling from the start in that way - which was never a good move regardless of if nVidia got "full DX10" features or not.

Very very few games were ever developed with DX10+ in mind and I don't know why you keep flogging that because its patently untrue - so say most games out there are dx10.1 compatible is complete and utter rubbish... The only games that I know of that would fit what your saying are stalker:cs, assassins creed and lost planet... and most of these "disabled" features are already present and will be taken advantage of if the hardware supports it - i.e. the surface water shaders in stalker:cs, assassins creed would need a patch and so would crysis... developers simply don't waste much time implementing major features they don't see being used in release of the game.
 
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I remember Hellgate: London ran at about half the speed while having no visual improvement at all :)

Lord of the Rings online added nice realistic tree shadows that made forests look fantastic in sunny weather.

Other than that I've never even noticed when it's in use.

Edit - Did Age of Conan ever get around to adding it? They were famous for advertising DX10 support on the box when it was released, and it still wasn't implemented in-game a year later.
 
age of conan have, but only as a test thing iirc. it works though, although if i look over a whole area from on top of a mountain or w/e i drop to like 14 fps. Setting at max everything, as in view distance etc all the way to the right, all features on, 8 x af and 4 x aa at 2560. In a normal situation it runs pretty damn nicely (40-190 fps depending on how many people and how big/busy the room is etc)

edit: could easily improve this by taking my view distance down from 5KM or w/e it is, but it looks so pretty seeing the whole area in max detail lol
 
Some screenies if you care, these were taken a while back, and they ahvent fully implemented everything. Under water in a sunny area is a lrge difference, but i dont have a shot of that. The transparency looks a lot nicer in screenshot 4, but im not sure if thats dx10 or just from turning all the settings up.
They are also all in jpeg format, so lose some quality :(
3.jpg


1.jpg


2.jpg


4.jpg
 
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He doesn't mean that he physically installed DX10. I think he just means that now he's using Windows 7 he can play games in DX10 rendering mode.
 
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