Thread: Assassin's Creed DX10.1 controversy

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14707

We have been following a brewing controversy over the PC version of Assassin's Creed and its support for AMD Radeon graphics cards with DirectX 10.1 for some time now. The folks at Rage3D first broke this story by noting some major performance gains in the game on a Radeon HD 3870 X2 with antialiasing enabled after Vista Service Pack 1 is installed—gains of up to 20%. Vista SP1, of course, adds support for DirectX version 10.1, among other things. Rage3D's Alex Voicu also demonstrated some instances of higher quality antialiasing—some edges were touched that otherwise would not be—with DX10.1. Currently, only Radeon HD 3000-series GPUs are DX10.1-capable, and given AMD's struggles of late, the positive news about DX10.1 support in a major game seemed like a much-needed ray of hope for the company and for Radeon owners.

Nice article.
This is the work of the green fan boys hard at work.

You did not see controversy articles like this for crysis.
Then again there is still no machine to run 8x ultra high 1920x1200.

here is dx10.1 broken down for ya

Direct3D 10.1
Direct3D 10.1 was announced by Microsoft shortly after the release of Direct3D 10. It's a minor update to the Direct3D 10 interface, adding features that had to be left out of the initial specification[citation needed]. Direct3D 10.1 sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, and gives developers more control over image quality.[15] Its feature will be supported exclusively by new hardware.

The Direct3D 10.1 API is now included with the Windows Vista SP1,which is available since mid-March. The specification was finalized with the release of November 2007 DirectX SDK. [1] Direct3D 10.1 will be backwards compatible with Direct3D 10.0 hardware, but the new features will not be available until 10.1 compliant hardware is released. The only available Direct3D 10.1 hardware as of November 2007 is the Radeon HD 3000 series from ATI and the upcoming Chrome 430 GPU from S3 Graphics. NVIDIA will not be releasing any hardware to support Direct3D 10.1, the first GeForce 9 cards to be released will use GPUs from GeForce 8 series cards which support up to Direct3D 10.0. NVIDIA plans to go straight to Direct3D 11; but the first GPU specific to GeForce 9 series, was released before Direct3D 11 ( Geforce 9600 GT ).[16]

Direct3D 10.1 features bigger control over antialiasing (both multisampling and supersampling with per sample shading and application control over sample position), more flexibilities to some of the existing features (cubemap arrays, independent blending modes). Direct3D 10.1 hardware must support the following features:

Mandatory 32-bit floating point filtering
Mandatory 4x anti-aliasing
Shader model 4.1

mc strange
From what I take on it nvidia is not gonna do dx10.1 but go straight to dx11 whenever the hell that comes out(years).

Originally Posted by jason_jinx

mc strange
From what I take on it nvidia is not gonna do dx10.1 but go straight to dx11 whenever the hell that comes out(years).

From what I read the benefit was and is possibly due to rendering passes being excluded or some nonsense like that. Either way from the screens I saw the ATI cards looke better and ran faster under the 10.1.
I dont care what nvidia does, but unless dx11 is out this year they would be stupid to skip 10.1. Then again one game does not make a consensus that we will see actual benefit from 10.1..