DX11 - Hardware tesselation, Compute shaders, Multi threading, Programmable chipsets

[WRobN]

For anyone who didnt knew...

DX11 is comming and its going to set your world on fire!
These upcomming videocards that have full DX11 support will change gaming forever.

And the weirdest part is that near May the cheapest DX11(non beta) card is better then the best card now available!!!

Without and... with Tesselation. See the difference...

Spoiler:

Dx10 to... DX11; more vertices, more polygons.

Spoiler:

A few other pics rendered with DX11

Spoiler:

AMD explaining DX11 (Im a Intel type of person but this video blew my mind!)

Dirt 2 DX11 Tech demo (just watch...)

Unigine "Heaven" DX11 Benchmark (Pretty, Prettier, DX11 !!!)


And at last but not least, the wiki with al the tech specs a drooling computernerd like me wants to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_11

[ParadigmShifter]

So basically tessellation is dynamic vertex shading, nice.

[WRobN]

Originally Posted by ParadigmShifter

So basically tessellation is dynamic vertex shading, nice.

No, tesselation creates coordinates by a subdivision rule onto the low-res mesh.
These coordinates in fact create the points needed to more triangles and quads/lines.
Then vertex shading is cumputed from that mesh using the coordinates.

[duckduckswan]

Noooooooo! I can't afford to upgrade!

[TheDS]

Somebody's using a lighting trick to make the DX11 pics brighter and therefore look "better". Additionally, in his cobblestone pic, there's simply NO WAY the stones would look deeper like that unless the demo was rigged to give a new wireframe map when tesselation was turned on. You can clearly see they rigged it. DX11 shouldn't need tricks like those to sell it.

DX11 will improve the appearance of curved surfaces by throwing in more polygons. I think it's pretty much interpolating where additional vertices should be, then drawing them. The level of detail in the cobblestone demo looked to be about a 10-fold increase in the number of vertices, if not more. Doing this without bogging down the GPU would be cool.

Lastly, DX11 has multi-threading to allow more of the graphics card to work at the same time. They said many parts of a GPU are idle at any given time, and by breaking graphical processes into threads, more of the GPU can be used, resulting in a speed increase.

Supposedly heat is a concern for the designers. I don't see how it can be anything but an oven when the whole chip is doing work instead of just little bits of it, but they say they're doing something to keep that from happening. Most likely the threading isn't going to be as big a benefit as they implied it would be.

Overall, in their demo they were able to about double the frame rates while also making things look a little prettier. Who's to say that'll happen "in the real world", but we'll see.

[Tarkhan]

it looks like someone cranked up the bloom in the DX11 pics.

I can tell the difference, but it doesn't look like enough to justify an upgrade right away though.

[civ_king]

Looks like OpenGL 4 except weaker...

[CivGeneral]

Meh, old news to me. I already have DX11. Though sadly does not improve any of the Source game's graphics .

[Tarkhan]

Originally Posted by Tarkhan

it looks like someone cranked up the bloom in the DX11 pics.

I can tell the difference, but it doesn't look like enough to justify an upgrade right away though.

Doh. A suddenly failing GPU fan kind of justified an upgrade shortly after I posted that.