I think I missed the DX10 phase completely. I remember all the promises made with HLSL and how much better things would look. Apart from Crysis, nothing else impressed or was a clear upgrade from DX9. Infact, I doubt many 'enthusiasts' can tell the difference between DX 9/10/ or the coming DX11. I was googling for image differences between 9 and 10 and 90% of the time there is no difference at all. The link posted here show an incomplete model of a render and then the complete version when the button is clicked. Can we expect any REAL upgrades graphically or just those ATI, Microsoft and Nvidia 'promise' us? Enlighten me because clearly I'm missing the hype.
Textures are only as good as the designers that make them, same for engines, lighting effects and everything else.
You can write a dx54 game, that looks worse than a dx4 game, because, thats life.
Most of what DX does is give you acceleration options to speed up things you could do before, so you can use the option more, or with less overhead, enabling you to use more power for other things.
DX2/8/9/11/64 have no real bearing on quality, just the ease of being able to make a game better looking. Its far easier to make a stunning looking dx11 game, than a dx8 game, but a game being dx11, doesn't automatically make it look better than a DX8 game.
For instance, say you have a lighting effect that takes up 20% of the gpu power in DX9, and due to optimisations and acceleration, uses 2% on a dx11 gpu, it means they have 18% more power to play with, so they can increase the rest of the settings aswell.
DX10 never took off, because the large majority of useful functionality, was ripped out before it was released(thank Nvidia for that), so it really didn't offer many optimisations or IQ improvements, so the lack of performance improvements, meant no spare power to use to improve anything. Crysis looks fantastic, not because its DX10, not because its DX9, but because the engine, is a very very well designed engine with designers who had a major goal to make the best looking game they could. Thats not a major design goal for every game, ever company or every designer.
