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Whats the Deal with DX10?
nickman1993
Member Posts: 287
Im seeing a lot of screens with DX10 and i think its the most amazing thing i've ever seen in my life. But i was wondering is it actually playable?!?! could i get on right know with dx10 if so then sign me up! Is it buggy?
Comments
It works and quite well if you have a PC that can run it! Its also been live in LOTRO since last fall, and had a few issues with certain cards, but most if not all of them have been resolved!
I have 3gigs of RAM a 9500 Quad Core Processor-2.2ghz and a Nvidia Geoforce graphic 8500 thats 256mb (might be higher cant remember)
Will i still be able to run it good on like high settings?
Just DL the High Res DX10 trial client and find out!
That should be enough for high settings, but I suggest you to spend some money to buy geforce 9600gt, which is powerful enough to run the game all maxed out with some average fps of 40. Depending on the store and country, they cost some 100-200 euros or dollars.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
DX10 is a major upgrade to graphic quality over DX9 in LOTRO. Definitely worth the effort. I run two PCs with DX9 on one and DX10 on the other. Planning on upgrading the second to DX10 since its such a dramatic increase in visual quality.
It is really? I've heard it just adds depth to the shadows and that it's not all that big a deal.
Now I haven't seen any side by side, nor do I have Vista for the DX10, but I do love the game and it looks so nice in DX9, I can't believe it could be that much more in DX10 - makes me want to buy Vista
LotRO: Meneldor: Riders of the Riddermark
I posted two screenshots one in DX 10 and other in 9. Honestly there is hardly any difference. You can have a look at screenshot topic if you want. The above one is DX 10 and the picture below is 9.
Shadows and the edges of the water are the big differences in dx 10.
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Brandywine Global LFF chan "/joinchannel glff"
Screen shots wont do the difference justice. I run 3 monitors on two PCs. One is running DX10 on an 8800GT in Vista 64bit. The other is running DX9 in XP on a ATI 3870, I plan on upgrading this to Vista soon quite simply to get the DX10 running on both.
Both PC are running on 24inch monitors, one a Dell the other a Samsung. I have dual monitors on my primary PC w/ the 8800GT to check out web pages while in game.
Both are running on almost maxes settings at 1920x1200 and the different is substantial. Anyone telling you different has got to be blind. DX10 improves shadows and lighting. Well guess what, almost everything you see outside of textures is based upon shadows and lighting in LOTRO.
Under DX10 LOTRO looks far more realistic, especially water, and shadows. In fact LOTRO is the first game that I can seriously say the DX10 upgrade was worth the effort.
I will admit I'm in love with Vista 64bit and 8 gigs of memory. The system screams in any game. If I had to choose between Vista 32 and XP 32, I would stay with XP unless I was playing LOTRO a lot and had a DX10 compatible card.
BTW: I have two lifetime LOTRO accounts, so I'm comparing the exact same screens in real time.
good
The improved shadows and water have nothing to do with DX10 and are just as easily done in DX9C.
DirectX 10 is not the holy grail, it won't magically improve the quality of the graphics or improve speed. It's a new API, nothing more.
Unless you go the full route and make a 100% DX10 renderer (such as with AC) rather than a hybrid (such as LOTRO), you won't see any benefit from it over DX9C.
LOTRO's DX10 "exclusive" shadows are nothing more than dynamic shadow maps with PCF. This capability has been around since the Geforce 3 (though it wasn't until the Geforce 6 that cards had enough power to even think about using shadow maps for fully dynamic landscape lighting). NVIDIA's marketing department is what keeps it DX10 exclusive.
If Turbine really wanted to show off the power of DX10, they should have used something a bit newer like summed-area variance shadow maps which eliminates the aliasing effects common to PCF shadows.
What you type: "
Unless you go the full route and make a 100% DX10 renderer (such as with AC) rather than a hybrid (such as LOTRO), you won't see any benefit from it over DX9C.
LOTRO's DX10 "exclusive" shadows are nothing more than dynamic shadow maps with PCF. This capability has been around since the Geforce 3 (though it wasn't until the Geforce 6 that cards had enough power to even think about using shadow maps for fully dynamic landscape lighting). NVIDIA's marketing department is what keeps it DX10 exclusive.
If Turbine really wanted to show off the power of DX10, they should have used something a bit newer like summed-area variance shadow maps which eliminates the aliasing effects common to PCF shadows."
What I hear, "Blah blah blah DX10"
What I see, vastly improved graphics when comparing DX9 beside a DX10 on almost exactly the same hardware.
What I know, DX10 in LOTRO is a major upgrade in visual quality.
You actually couldn't be more wrong. The way to do what LotRO does with shadows in DX9 was to use shadow maps. They are NOT required in DX10 and are part of hardware shadow acceleration. Therefore it does not require the time to create shadow maps for every 3D object in the game. It also allows shading to persist across other 3D objects, such as shadows cast onto buildings from another building or onto the player itself. The dynamic shadows make a HUGE difference in visual quality.
Second point about soft shore effects is also a feature in DX10 that used to be done manually in DX9. Particle clipping is also greatly improved, so particle effects don't get wierded out when meeting a 3D edge, especially a ground texture. These are things that happen in other DX10 games as well (Bioshock) but are VERY noticable in LotRO.
You actually couldn't be more wrong. The way to do what LotRO does with shadows in DX9 was to use shadow maps. They are NOT required in DX10 and are part of hardware shadow acceleration. Therefore it does not require the time to create shadow maps for every 3D object in the game. It also allows shading to persist across other 3D objects, such as shadows cast onto buildings from another building or onto the player itself. The dynamic shadows make a HUGE difference in visual quality.
Second point about soft shore effects is also a feature in DX10 that used to be done manually in DX9. Particle clipping is also greatly improved, so particle effects don't get wierded out when meeting a 3D edge, especially a ground texture. These are things that happen in other DX10 games as well (Bioshock) but are VERY noticable in LotRO.
"Hardware Shadow Acceleration" has existed in one form or another since the original Geforce 256. "Hardware Shadow Maps" have been around since the Geforce 3.
I don't think you quite grasp the fundamentals of shadowing methods using the GPU.
There are two primary methods of rendering dynamic shadows. Shadow maps and shadow volumes.
With shadow mapping, for every light source, you take it's view of the world (as if it were a camera) and store it in a depth buffer. Anything that the light source cannot "see" (due to occlusion or attenuation) is considered shadowed from it. Shadow mapping is the predominant shadowing method for complex (especially outdoor) scenes because it's easier to implement and requires less computation power. They are also image-space, meaning that there is no geometry involved. The downside is that shadow maps are less accurate and the accuracy depends on the size of the shadow maps (the larger the size, the more accurate or "crisper" the shadows are, but at a cost of exponentially increasing VMEM usage). The shadows themselves are 2D textures which can be filtered accordingly. This downside can actually be an advantage as you don't always want supercrisp edges on shadows; soft shadows are much easier to do with shadow maps as a result.
Shadow volumes, the second method, are a screen-space algorithm which use geometry. With shadow volumes, the shadows themselves are actual geometric points which are then connected and filled in (hence the volume terminology). Shadow volumes work by essentially tracing light rays from the light source through every vertex (point) in a geometric object. Shadow volumes are accurate to the pixel and are not as VMEM intensive. The downside is that they are considerably more expensive from a computational standpoint. Shadow volumes are wholly unsuitable for lush outdoor environments as the amount of vertices in all of the foilage would be murder on even the most burley of computers. In addition, because the shadows from shadow volumes are geometry and not textures, it's harder to produce soft shadows (you generally have to use a blur shader around the edges rather than just doing texture filtering). Shadow volumes are much more suited for indoor environments where the types of light sources you find tend to produce harder edged shadows and where the geometry is less complex.
In DX9 mode, LOTRO uses static bitmap shadows for outdoor objects and stencil shadow volumes for characters and indoor objects.
In DX10 mode, LOTRO uses shadow maps for outdoor objects AND outdoor characters but retains stencil shadow volumes for indoor use.
In both DX9 and DX10, shadow maps are accelerated (R600+, Geforce 3+) through the use of hardware depth stencil textures. All you have to do for basic shadow maps in both DX9 and DX10 is declare a texture DST, and then write a few lines of code telling the GPU to do shadow mapping and the video card automatically handles the brunt of the work including doing all of the relevant calculations.
As for soft particles, they are still clipping, you just can't see it. Essentially, you render the scene's depth to a texture and then change the particle's alpha (transparency) accordingly based on their depth relative to the scene's. This is also possible in DX9 (and OpenGL).