- Joined
- Oct 5, 2001
- Messages
- 30,085
DirectX 9 vs DirectX11 in Civilization 5
DirectX 11 (or DX11) is Microsoft's latest incarnation of the DirectX API, a set of Application Programming Interfaces that are used for multimedia on a PC, and graphics in particular. DX11 adds some new features to allow better graphics details, such as tessellation and improved multi-threading, along with some other graphical enhancements. The first game to be released supporting DX11 was the RTS game BattleForge, initially released as a DX9 / DX10 game, and updated to support DX 11 in September 2009. There are currently only a handful of titles that have been released with DX11 support, and Civilization 5 is now one of them.
Civilization 5 ships with two versions: a DX9 version, and a DX11 version. In this review here, I will endeavor to show you the differences between the two; but first a word on availability:
In order to play the directx 11 version, you need to have both a video card that supports DX11 (ATI Radeon 5XXX or higher, or NVIDIA GeForce 4XX or higher), and an operating system that supports DX11 as well: Windows 7, or Vista (SP2). For those of you who have Windows XP, unfortunately you're out of luck: DX11 is not supported under XP. For those of you that have Vista SP2 or Windows 7, but don't have a graphics card that supports DX11, hopefully this article might help you decide whether an upgrade is a good option.
Before we get into the differences between the two, I need to give you the "disclaimer" bit. CFC was contacted a couple of weeks ago by NVIDIA. NVIDIA have been providing some support to Firaxis on the graphics hardware side for Civ5, and just over a week ago, they released a new entry-level (affordable) DX11 card, the GeForce GTS 450. NVIDIA proposed that they could send me one of these cards for review. Well, we're not a hardware review site, and if I tried to get into the technical details of the benefits of CUDA vs other graphics architecture, I would get shot to pieces by those who know a heck of a lot more about it than me. So I saw this as an opportunity not to review the card per-se, but to show you how such a card can (in my opinion) improve the look of Civilization 5, by giving you access to all the bells & whistles that come with DX11. We will also use this as an opportunity to tell you about a NVIDIA Civilization 5 promotion, but we'll get to that later.
So a bit about the set-up I used here. I have two PCs - one is a few years old, the other not so old. I ran the "System Requirements" checks using System Requirements Info on my older PC (Core II Duo, E6600 running at 2.4 GHz), and it told me I met the "minimum CPU" requirement, but no the "minimum speed" requirement for the CPU. I'm not really sure why it concluded that, but to allow this to be a graphics-focused discussion, I used my more modern PC - a Core i7 860. All tests were run on this, using a ViewSonic VX2433wm 24" widescreen. Resolution was set to 1920x1080, 60Hz refresh rate, and "WaitForVerticalSync" set in the game options. Now, I'm no expert, but I understand that this option forces the game to limit the number of frames per second to the screen refresh rate. This is the standard option, and designed to give a smooth display. Other graphics options, I all set to "high" detail level.
The graphics options available in Civ5 are shown below:
Now: One important point to note is that (in my setup at least), anti-aliasing is set to "off" for the DX9 version - the option is grayed-out (the screenshot above is for the graphics settings for the DX11 version). Anti-aliasing is a technology used to smooth-out jagged lines on textures (read more about it here). Now, while Civ5 doesn't seem to support anti-aliasing, the in-game settings can be over-ridden using the NVIDIA graphics control panel. I did actually try this to demonstrate the effect, and you can see the difference in the image below. The image on the left is with Anti-Aliasing via the NVIDIA control panel, set at 8x. The image on the right shows the standard image.
![](http://www.civfanatics.com/ainwood/AA_Effect.jpg)
You can see from the image above, that the lines along the vertex of the tent are sharper and more jagged in the non-AA version.
Now: One other point:
In Civ5, there is a minimum default zoom level. To show the textures in all their glory, I changed a setting in the Config.ini file for Civ5.
Code:
; How close you can get (11.0=default, 4.0=debug zoom)
Minimum Zoom Level = 4.000000
This has allowed me to zoom in to really see the details up-close.
And finally, before we get onto the review proper, let me state that I am not an expert on the subtleties of these two technologies. I aim to show you the differences between the two in terms of the graphical experience playing Civ5, but if I have my explanations wrong, then please forgive me!
Now: On to the review!