Thread: LoL DX11

ATI: DX11, 40nm GPUs on track for a 2009 launch
By Joel Hruska | Published: October 05, 2008 - 05:05PM CT

ATI has announced that it expects to see DirectX 11 GPUs appear in 2009, implying that the company intends to launch its own DX11-compliant cards within the next 12-14 months. The company is currently showcasing a variety of next-generation graphics technologies at the Japanese trade show Ceatec, as well as discussing its upcoming transition to 40nm process technology and the rise of GPGPU.

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DirectX 11 is expected to enhance support for both GPGPU functions and multithreading; both capabilities are seen as essential given the advent of multi-core computers and processing environments. Support for hardware tessellation will be an explicit part of the DirectX standard for the first time. To date, ATI's HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series have all contained a hardware tessellation unit, courtesy of the company's work on the XBox 360 GPU.

Said tessellator is used in XBox 360 games but has been ignored by PC game developers, even when porting games that originated on the XBox to begin with. The tessellation unit currently built into existing ATI cards, by the way, is not DX11- compatible, and is only capable of some of the capabilities the new standard requires. The good news, however, is that DX11 will be ported to Windows Vista as well as Windows 7—there will be no need to "upgrade" one's OS this time around. Those of you still on XP might as well get used to the idea of Vista or Vista's successors—if you stay on Windows, you're headed that direction, and DX11 won't be coming to XP, either.

Microsoft will also introduce Shader Model 5.0 with the new standard, and even older cards will be able to take advantage of a few of DX11's advanced multithreading capabilities, provided developers and driver authors support them in previous-generation video cards. ATI also predicts a number of advances in the next year, including increased support for GPGPU functions, broader use of OpenCL (Open Computer Language), and the rise of consumer-level applications that can use GPU computing capabilities effectively. The push here is to drive the idea of the video card as a computing platform in its own right, out of the supercomputer/HPC arena and into the home. If such a drive just happens to sell more GPUs, or leads to higher attach rates for discrete cards, well, that'd be ok, too.

GDDR5 will become the dominant memory standard. We'll see 40nm process technology cards at some point (no word on when), and the industry rolls on. DX11 seems less about improving visuals (though there's some of that) and more about improving GPU computational capabilities and efficiency in a variety of environments. For those who might say Microsoft is moving too fast by rolling DX11 so soon after DX10, what we're actually seeing here is a return to form. DX8 launched in November of 2000, followed by DX8.1 in 2001, DX9.0 in 2002, 9.0a in 2003, 9.0b just months later, and finally, DX 9.0c in 2004. Two years later we had DirectX 10 (Nov 30, 2006) and now, sometime in 2009, DX11.

Oh—I made up the bit about the free monkey.

Further reading:
bit-tech.net: "DirectX 11: A look at what's coming" Excellent article for anyone curious about DX11's feature set and capabilities.

Dx 11 specs

DirectX 11: A look at what's coming
Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 17th September 2008 Comments (27)

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Stumble 1 - DirectX 11: A look at what's coming 2 - Where we're heading 3 - Tessellation - 1 4 - Tessellation - 2 5 - Compute Shader 6 - Multi-threading 7 - Dynamic Shader Linkage and Texturing 8 - Initial Thoughts... Comments (27) Email to a friend Next page DirectX 11: A look at what's coming
It doesn't seem all that long ago when Microsoft first started talking about what DirectX 10 would bring to game development. In fact, it was less than two years ago when we described the new pipeline and since then we've had a couple of generations of hardware from both AMD and Nvidia.

With the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft introduced DirectX 10.1 – we covered this in our RV670 architectural analysis and so far only AMD has adopted the updated API. Nvidia claims that developers wanted other things—like GPU-accelerated game physics—and so it chose to focus on those features in the GT200 architecture.

Some would say it was stifling progression in graphics, while others believe it's the first major shift away from just focusing on just graphics in games. Whichever way you look at it, it was a little controversial given what happened to Assassin's Creed.

And so we arrive at DirectX 11, the next major update to Microsoft's fabled graphics API. Microsoft's DirectX architects haven't been resting on their laurels since DirectX 10's release – in fact, even before DirectX 10.1 shipped with Vista SP1, the company had already started work on what is now known as DirectX 11, but that's certainly not the end of it because developers we've spoken to have even made comments about what they need in DirectX 12!

Microsoft announced the new API at GameFest 2008 in Seattle but it's still a work in progress. Since then we've had the chance to listen to Kevin Gee of Microsoft outline the API at Nvision 2008, and then following that we were able to catch up with a number of developers in order to discuss the new API and its aims. Additionally, we've listened to what was discussed at GameFest as well, since Microsoft has conveniently made all of its presentations—and accompanying audio recordings—available for public consumption.

What follows is the result of all of this information gathering I've done ever since the original announcement was made in July. However, because it's still a work in progress, things may change between now and DirectX 11's RTM date.


Where we are now
When DirectX 10 was released, Microsoft decided to wipe the slate clean and start afresh. What followed was a completely new driver model, which meant that compatibility with older Windows operating systems, like the incredibly popular Windows XP for example, was controversially cut out.

The DirectX team's latest baby came to Vista, and Vista alone. This was undoubtedly a brave decision to make, but it was a necessary one in order to finally get rid of problems that have been around since DirectX first arrived on the scene in 1995.

Before DirectX 10 arrived, it's fair to say that Microsoft's API was becoming increasingly more difficult to code because of the optional features – instead, it just had to expose the capability to the API.

Exposing the capability but not being able to use the feature at all is about as useful as a chocolate teapot – the good thing is that with DirectX 10, Microsoft made everything in the specifications mandatory. It became an all-or-nothing affair, and that was great news for developers because they no longer had to worry about what hardware they were developing for and there was no longer a need for vendor-specific codepaths.

DirectX 10 wasn't without its problems though and DirectX 10.1 went some way to fixing some of the shortcomings – in fact, it was coined 'Complete D3D10' by Microsoft. I know above I'd just said that there were no optional features in DirectX 10, but in actual fact there were a few – FP32 filtering and 4xMSAA were now required features for DirectX 10.1 compliance, but since most DirectX 10 hardware supports both of these features already, that's not really where 10.1's biggest attraction is.

Instead, D3D10.1's biggest attraction according to the developers we've spoken to is the ability to use MSAA in conjunction with deferred rendering (as used in any game based on Unreal Engine 3, along with several others too) without needing to render the depth to a texture. Instead, with DirectX 10.1, you're able to read from the multi-sample depth buffer when there are multiple render targets – this can improve performance quite considerably (in the region of 20 to 30 percent), because the operation can be completed in just a single pass.

Always something new.
New stuff is coming out way to fast now days they need to slow down.

Originally Posted by Cecil900

I want something revolutionary, not evolutionary like DX10.

oh its going to happen once ppl get past the vista scare :3

come on! we dont even have any games to play on our fancy DX10 cards! a new one already!

seriously what are there like 3 dx10 games?