Interesting article about DX11 and Civ 5 at Anandtech

[deanej]

Comeon, this really comes out as sour grapes. One big angry rant at good grapchics, it's just hard to take you serious. If your system is inadequate, then please understand that pc gaming has moved into DX11 territory, and it's a good thing.

1. Gaming has NOT moved into DX11 territory. Not yet anyways. Just because something will happen in the future does not mean that it has already happened.

2. Civ5's advanced graphics effects are ONLY for nVidia cards. Got a DX11 card that isn't nVidia? Sucks to be you.

 

[Kaosprophet]

Comeon, this really comes out as sour grapes. One big angry rant at good grapchics, it's just hard to take you serious. If your system is inadequate, then please understand that pc gaming has moved into DX11 territory, and it's a good thing.

The problem with AI is a problem with AI. It's not some sort of dirty tradeoff made by CEO's now is it.

You come out as a corporate shill for nVidia or MS, so I guess it's even

Actually, it completely is. Resources and budget are limited, thus anything devoted to one area of design is less to apply to other areas. So when one area comes out great but the rest of the game comes out terrible, it pretty much is because of a tradeoff made somewhere.

Also, I do not consider the death of open, cross-platform APIs such as OpenGL to be a 'good thing' at all.

 

[Mark the Bold]

I still know tons of people rocking XP and dx9 cards, PC gaming's giant flaw is they think they need to push the graphics of every damn new game. There's a reason older great games are still played by tons of people, (cs 1.6, starcraft1, daiblo2 etc.) graphics DO NOT make a game better.

Agreed. I just replayed Half Life 2 last month and was amazed at how great it still looks AND how smooth it works on even very modest systems.

Oh and its a blast too. sigh

 

[Mark the Bold]

I have an ATI 4870x2 card and except for tesselation (whih is used only for leaderheads) and other DX11 features (which seems to concern more the performance than graphic appearance) i can have all details set to maximum.
Considered that my GPU is 3 years old, the engine shows to be really scalable.
I have also friends which run the game with a single core CPU.

Taking in account that this game could have a potential lifespan of 5 years i'm quite sure that this was a really wise decision.

Where this game partially fails is in the gameplay not certainly in its technical proficiency

I run this game with a single 4870 in DX11 mode. I bypass the menu choice by right clicking the shaded out DX11 menu option and creating a shortcut on the desktop.

The only time its sluggish is when I freshly load a new game. Once I scroll around for a little bit, its fine.

 

[Randall Turner]

You come out as a corporate shill for nVidia or MS, so I guess it's even

Actually, it completely is. Resources and budget are limited, thus anything devoted to one area of design is less to apply to other areas. So when one area comes out great but the rest of the game comes out terrible, it pretty much is because of a tradeoff made somewhere.

Also, I do not consider the death of open, cross-platform APIs such as OpenGL to be a 'good thing' at all.

It's not that flexible. It depends on staffing, which is fairly static. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

I'm a system level engineer working on video games, and though they can put me on AI, I'm not very cost-effective, especially on legacy architecture.

Likewise, they could fire me and hire one-and-a-half AI programmers, but they're going to need me down the road again anyway.

At the end of the day I don't think doing a solid job on the baseline engine was a bad decision on Firaxis' part. They just need to put some more work into the next iteration of AI. <shrug>

 

[Nyanko]

2. Civ5's advanced graphics effects are ONLY for nVidia cards. Got a DX11 card that isn't nVidia? Sucks to be you.

...
Untill ATI put out the drivers, which should be this month.

 

[deanej]

And it will take a lot longer for those drivers to propagate out. ATI doesn't release drivers, they release the Catalist Control suite, so if you want just the drivers, you have to wait for Microsoft or your computer manufacturer to release them for you.

Besides, since when does nVidia get to set the standard? The API should be set by Microsoft. DX11 is DX11. Clearly nVidia collaborated with Firaxis to create some non-standard implementation that now everyone has to implement or be left behind. Ridiculous.

 

[CTH]

ATI already has driver out, but they are pretty beta, but as Nyanko mentioned final should be out this month

 

[MoonFlare]

Agreed. I just replayed Half Life 2 last month and was amazed at how great it still looks AND how smooth it works on even very modest systems.

Oh and its a blast too. sigh

Games from VALVe have really good optimization.REALLY GOOD.I can run TF2 at almost max settings without lag on my dual-core,nvidia 9500gt,2GB RAM.Portal 2 will be another huge success with that.The main problem of pushing the graphics so far is that game developers forget to optimize their games.They think that every PC gamer has a high-end rig.BF3 is a good example.It's a very bad move not to include DX9 support.How many gamers still own DX9 systems and can't get a new one?Way too many.And Civ5 - the graphics are good but they are far away from what you should expect for such system reqs.It's bad game optimization

 

[player1 fanatic]

Check this out:
http://blogs.amd.com/play/2011/03/1...review-driver-that-you-have-been-waiting-for/

With new 11.4, Civ5 is supposed to be 70% faster over 10.9 & 11.2 drivers, when using 6870 card.

 

[skallben]

So they divert resources necessary to make the game good to cosmetics, in order to make the game look good on some Nvidia DX11 chipsets. I get that.

Like it or not, people care about graphics and investing time into it makes it possible to use the engine longer, it's a long term strategy as much as it about bragging rights at release.
This guy put it well:

Check this out:
http://blogs.amd.com/play/2011/03/1...review-driver-that-you-have-been-waiting-for/

With new 11.4, Civ5 is supposed to be 70% faster over 10.9 & 11.2 drivers, when using 6870 card.

But where you lose me is where you announce that this is a good thing. Making a worse game that looks good sometimes is better for the game company, how? Please help me out here, I cannot see the logic in your position.

This is probably due to bad planning, I'm pretty sure one of the Firaxis dude admitted it even. The people who develop the engine and those who make actual gameplay are not the same. So to understand how this questionable release could happen we need to take that into the calculation. Engine-techies did a good job, gameplay-division failed to deliver a polished gameplay at release. Should we blame project planning or 2K for enforcing release? I don't know and really don't care, the game is allready alot better than release. Optimally, I'd want to see that all games are released in a polished state but it's obviously and sadly not how things are done.

 

[Horizons]

If the graphics engine is so 'technologically advanced' then why does Civ5 have crappy rivers, painted-on static trees, and in general look distinctly average and 'meh'?

 

[bryanw1995]

That is indeed interesting.

I'd been under the (apparently mistaken) impression that when Firaxis said Civ5 could scale to 12 threads, they meant the AI could scale to 12 threads. Thus I was surprised when early reports were that the AI turn times didn't benefit from multiple threads. Now it makes sense that Firaxis was being accurate about Civ5 using 12 threads... just not in the area that (IMO) would be most useful.

Interesting, but not practical for me even if I bought Civ5, as I run DX10 hardware on a DX9 operating system.

When the game first came out, there were specific dx10 hacks that would give you the faster speed of the dx11 codepath. I don't know if those are still necessary. If you end up getting the game and need the links, let me know.

 

[bryanw1995]

10%? yeah right. I would guess that not even 1% of civ V buyers have the necessary video card and system specs to take advantage of this technology. What on earth were they thinking? For a small fraction of the budget, they could have made a lower-tech game which runs properly on all systems. My computer is less than a year old and has a fairly good video card, but it still lags at least 10 seconds on each turn.

really? less than 1% of civ5 owners have a quad core intel cpu that will clock over 3 ghz and a gtx 460 (low-midrange dx11) or better gpu? And a 5770 still does just fine at most resolutions, so technically all you need is a serviceable dx11 card. I had to upgrade my rig for civ 4, I see no reason why people who enjoy this game wouldn't do the same for civ 5.

I also tick all the boxes for the, so called, high end system...

I get great graphics from the game, and the end turns are not too long (unless I play epic/huge, which personally I find too long).

Judging by this thread so far, it's not 1% of folk with a "high end" system, not 10%, but getting on for 35% so far! In fact most people that have changed their system in the last year, and bought a machine for gaming. I can't understand why anyone interested in gaming WOULDN'T get a DX11 card! After all, it's going to be the future, many of them are no longer expensive, and it helps to future-proof your computer.

Thank you Fraxis, for having the foresight to develop in conjunction with nvidia.

I agree with this. I have an i7 920 that I bought in november 2009 and a gtx 460 that I bought in july 2010, so my rig isn't exactly brand new or even really "high end" anymore. With Bulldozer, Sandy Bridge E, and 28nm gpus coming out this fall I'll be getting decidedly long in the tooth in fact. Maybe some of our fellow fanatics with outdated systems should check out a cheap upgrade this fall?

 

[bryanw1995]

/agree

And being the owner of a multicore, high-end Windows 7 system that just happens to run a great AMD 5870 DX11 card that they didn't bother to optimize their graphics for, all I can say is, thanks a lot for nuthin'.

Game developers who buy into proprietary deals (no doubt for lots of payola to do so) to optimize their graphics for just one video chip maker at the expense of gamers who don't use one of those chips, can kiss my left cheek.

The graphics look ok, but if I'm missing cool DX11 stuff just because I happen to use AMD instead of nVidia... lovely. And I've been plagued with tile texture anomalies (finally fixed with one of the latest patches), and frequent scrolling crashes.

I had hoped that the old BS of game devs selling out to one video chip maker at the expense of everyone else, was a thing of the past. Guess not.

read the link I posted in the OP, it is AMD's relatively slow implementation of the specific dx11 features that has caused their cards to not perform as well. And in any civ game, how much higher than 30 fps do you really need? I've found myself much more likely over the courese of my civ-playing days to be bottlenecked by my cpu than by the gpu. And civ5 is no exception, regardless of your brand of gpu.

 

[joe80x86]

And it will take a lot longer for those drivers to propagate out. ATI doesn't release drivers, they release the Catalist Control suite, so if you want just the drivers, you have to wait for Microsoft or your computer manufacturer to release them for you.

Besides, since when does nVidia get to set the standard? The API should be set by Microsoft. DX11 is DX11. Clearly nVidia collaborated with Firaxis to create some non-standard implementation that now everyone has to implement or be left behind. Ridiculous.

Not quite true.

You can download the driver seperately on AMD's website. Also even if you had to download Catalyst how is this different from nVidia's driver package?

 

[bryanw1995]

I have an ATI 4870x2 card and except for tesselation (whih is used only for leaderheads) and other DX11 features (which seems to concern more the performance than graphic appearance) i can have all details set to maximum.
Considered that my GPU is 3 years old, the engine shows to be really scalable.
I have also friends which run the game with a single core CPU.

Taking in account that this game could have a potential lifespan of 5 years i'm quite sure that this was a really wise decision.

Where this game partially fails is in the gameplay not certainly in its technical proficiency

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2109007

This feature will be enabled automatically if your hardware has DX11 capabilities. We use tessellation for the Civilization V terrain, which adjusts the mesh's subdivision of the terrain as the user zooms in and out. Not only does it add detail, but terrain tessellation makes the game measurably faster on both Nvidia and AMD hardware (as much as 30% in some cases).

I believe that you are mistaken, tessellation makes a big difference for me in more than just leader scenes.

 

[bryanw1995]

Radeon 5870 and I crash regularly. (If you care about other relevant components: Phenom X4 955 3.2GHz, 4GB Mushkin O/C'd to 7/7/7/20, ASUS M4A79 XTD. And no, other games don't crash with the O/C. Well, except Fallout: New Vegas, but you expect that.)

Here's hoping that ATI catches back up to NVIDIA in the driver race. They're the clear leader in the price/performance silicon war at the moment, but NVIDIA has often had the better drivers.

I would say that nvidia drivers are, on average, slightly ahead of amd's. However, nvidia does have a very recent, VERY major driver snafu on the gtx 590:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/04/03/asus_geforce_gtx_590_overclocking_followup/

honestly, they should have had better hardware protections in place as well, but their driver team took the fall for this.

 

[bryanw1995]

1. Gaming has NOT moved into DX11 territory. Not yet anyways. Just because something will happen in the future does not mean that it has already happened.

2. Civ5's advanced graphics effects are ONLY for nVidia cards. Got a DX11 card that isn't nVidia? Sucks to be you.

If you actual read the linked article in the OP, then you would see from Ryan's posts that AMD is not far behind. I don't think that he gave a timetable for them, but it's a pretty sure bet that nvidia wouldn't have let him tell us exactly what they did if AMD didn't already have it figured out as well. This sort of thing happens quite often, some games (like DA2) strongly favor AMD at first, while others are better on NV hardware for a couple weeks (or, sometimes, months). In this particular case, the extreme amount of tessellation does favor Nvidia cards and will continue to do so even after AMD implements the dx11 fix. But on a game like civ 5 you don't really need much more than 30-40 fps from your gpu, anyway, and certainly post-patch you will be able to get that in most maps with any dx 11 card of the 5770/6790/gtx 550 level or better.

 

[bryanw1995]

And it will take a lot longer for those drivers to propagate out. ATI doesn't release drivers, they release the Catalist Control suite, so if you want just the drivers, you have to wait for Microsoft or your computer manufacturer to release them for you.

Besides, since when does nVidia get to set the standard? The API should be set by Microsoft. DX11 is DX11. Clearly nVidia collaborated with Firaxis to create some non-standard implementation that now everyone has to implement or be left behind. Ridiculous.

do you have an ati card? you can choose to download the driver, the current CCC version, or both (plus a bunch of random crap typically as well).