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DirectX9 VS 11... really so much better?
Getting myself a new comp soon, finally no longer bound to Win XP and DirectX 9 I checked some screenshots comparisions and... was not whelmed. Maybe it was in the details... but what I saw was sort of "err... ooookay this is different HOW again"?
Maybe I just picked the wrong games as referrence.
Anyone enlighten me about this?
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Comments
Still shots won't really do things justice but even so you should see a noticeable difference at max settings ion both.Most of what Directx 10/11 offers over 9 is in post processing and effects that only shine in motion.
Edit : It should also be said that Directx 11 does all that 9 does but more efficiently too.
Its kinda hard to explain. But DX11 is a higer fidelity. A deeper richness to the colors (among other things).
You may not have a moniter that can actually display that kind of fidelity if you cant see the difference.
Just Google "DX11 vs DX9" and then select Images in the Google tab. I can see obvious differences between DX10 and DX11.
Here found a good link for you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPtdnmib8A
And make sure you watch it in 1080p
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
As a developer I'll be very honest with you. From a consumer standpoint there is literally no difference. People will argue "Oh the tessellation" and "Oh the post processing", but when you get right down to it that's not actually the difference. What most people [who haven't been under the hood of a real game engine] don't realize is that DX9 is capable of all the same visual fidelity that DX10 and DX11 offer the only issue is performance. I'm sure some of us out there remember long ago when the world was young and the GTX 8800 (and AMD equivalent) ruled the scene Nvidia had a liquid dynamics Physics demo out. It was when Nvidia was introducing their physX cores being integrated into the GPU. That is something most would argue is a DX11 feature. Additionally we can look at tessellation. Tessellation has been possible in DX9 since Janet Jackson showed boob at the superbowl(ok so longer than that but still...). The only issue was getting it in realtime. Since DX11 offers some optimizations on a lot of the directx libraries and some openGL libraries(surprisingly) we are now able achieve this and do so in practical applications.
Now at the beginning of this post i said "From a consumer standpoint" and I meant that. Saying DX11 "looks" better than DX9 is like saying 64bit "looks" better than 32bit. NOW...before anyone jumps of the diving board into the deep end lets step back and say this; From a developer standpoint, both of software and of hardware, it is a HUGE difference. What DX11 allows for in the hardware, or rather what it can access and command in the hardware, is FAR beyond what DX9 could think up. To put this simply...Yeah, it actually might have been possible to achieve realtime tessellation but you would need a graphics card about 2.5 times the size of that old GTX 8800 that you've got stashed away in the closet. So put simply DX11 is completely reliant on its hardware to really be DX11. Otherwise it's just DX9 with other libraries that the previous-gen hardware can't use.
Hope this helps.
Also the only reason I really harped on Tessellation is because the video posted above me only really looked at the tesselation. As that's about all DX11 has over DX9 that is THAT substantial. Otherwise most things are possible in DX9 you'll just have to write your own libraries for some things.
P.S.
For the consumer...it's best to let the techno-mumbo jumbo fly over your head and say DX11 is pretty get yourself a new system.
Thanks Eberhardt for the detailled explanation. That really helped.
So it is not SOOO much better visually, but a leap in speed when I have a Win 8 computer over my Win XP, because Direct X11 handles stuff much faster, did I get that right?
Thanks all others, too. Was kinda wondering. I expect my shiny now Windows 8 computer today later I am jumpy like a child at christmas, lol. Was watching several "how to handle Win 8" windows on youtube to be prepared. Oh my. What did I get myself into.. o.0
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
If you don't mind my advice, treat the Metro like a glorified and pretty looking shortcuts page. Get rid of any of the apps you really are not going to use; they're just clutter. Add a Desktop shortcut to Metro as well. It's normally unneeded, but there have been times pressing Start would not take me back to the desktop and that shortcut became quite useful
Windows (key)+i is the hotkey to bring up the pane with the shut down button, btw ;P Some people have trouble finding it at first... Actually, if you go Microsoft store and under the free stuff and utilities (or tools, I forget specifically which) you can find a few programs that do nothing but tell you every useful hotkey. It will make navigating much faster.
Once your metro is setup, you'll still be sending over 90% of your time in your standard desktop mode, navigating just like you did in Windows 7, albeit with a slight speed boost and a much faster boot up time. And the Metro will serve as a surprisingly effective shortcuts hotbed.
The only issue I've ever had is that I find Windows 8 / Metro specific versions of programs to be far inferior to their desktop / Windows 7 counterparts. Luckily, if the same holds true for you then can use those, and do not have to use the Windows 8 ones
Thanks!
Ok one thing I didn't understand yet. In windows XP at the bottom I have the taskbar, which shows all open programs, often 4-6 here because I do so many things at the same time.
Where is that in Windows 8?
Also watching the Vids, when I "close" a programm/app does it close the program or just minimize? I didn't see any "X" at the top right to actually see the difference between close and minimize.
Too bad the right click context is so far below now. Eheheh. XD Is there still a normal context right click in the Desktop part?
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
The taskbar is still there and functions exactly the same when you're working on the desktop. It's only not there when you have the Metro UI up. You switch between them by just pressing the windows / start key on the keyboard
Closing programs only work differently when you're closing a Metro program. You close them by clicking and holding the center top part and pulling down. It's... it would be better if they had dedicated close buttons. I don't normally use metro programs, as I said before I find them way worse than the normal desktop versions. If you switch to working on something else and leave them idle in the background long enough and not doing anything, Windows will close these automatically.
Programs on the desktop close the same as they always have, and you'll see zero change there.
It's been so long since I've used XP, I don't remember all the options you got when right-clicking the desktop. But I can say that you have the same options as Win7 does when right-clicking on your desktop.
If you're like me, it'll take you about a month to get used to the changes and where everything is, but once you get used to it it'll be the same old same old.
It's kind of like asking if the difference between object oriented programming and procedural programming is a big deal. It's hard to find anything that you can point to and say, this is really cool and you can do it with object oriented programming but not procedural for reasons that are simple enough to explain to a non-programmer.
The biggest difference between DirectX 11 and 9.0c, in my opinion, is geometry shaders, which were added in DirectX 10. That lets you offload some pretty broad classes of computations from the CPU to the GPU, and that lets you get the same quality of graphics on much weaker hardware. The problem is that a game that relies heavily on this is either going to have to make two wildly different code paths for the same effects, or else it's not going to have a DirectX 9.0c version at all.
Tessellation is basically procedurally generated vertex data. But I'm not aware of any games that have really taken advantage of what tessellation can do. The geometrically intuitive way to use it is that, if you want to draw a manifold with boundary, you pick a triangulation of it as your vertex data, and then specify a homeomorphism between the triangulation and the manifold with boundary as well as the normal bundle to your manifold in domain shaders. If you have no clue what that means, then that's the point--especially if you have a programming background. Very few professional game programmers have anywhere near the necessary math background to do tessellation properly, so they mostly ignore it, or at most, do something stupid with it that misses the point.
oh my god windows 8..... /leaves
/returns FOR THE LOVE OF GOD UNINSTALL THAT CRAP AND INSTALL WINDOWS 7
Windows 8 is the new Vista, wait for the next version that's what I am doing.
As to the DX11 vs DX9 as most have said there is little difference unless the game is specificly designed for DX11, if you want a real world example you could always download a WoW trial and check out DX9 mode and DX11 mode, about the only difference visually you'll see are full world and object reflections, god rays, improved shadows and some extra shaders.
To be fair to game devs I believe that's because their development focus is mainly console and neither the PS3 or Xbox 360 can do stuff like tessellation and other directx 10/11 features via hardware.Now some devs have found software ways to do these features in a limited way at the end of the current console cycle(I believe Gran Turismo 6 is the first PS3 game to feature Tessellation).
There is not enough money int he PC game market by comparison to the console market to attract the kind of talent and budgets to make games that push what PCs can really do on that front because those games would be PC only.Very few even put the money in to add these things in any meaningful way to PC ports.
Now the next gen will be capable of these things and we will probably see more progress.
Talking about tessellation in a PS3 game is missing the point. I'm sure that there were programs that could do tessellation 20 years ago. What's new (as of 2009) is the ability to do it on the GPU chip, and fast enough that you can redo it every single frame and actually increase your performance that way.
Really exploiting the newer features isn't something that can be tacked on to a game designed to not use the features without missing the point. If you want to use tessellation properly in a game that was originally built to not use it, then for starters, you throw out most of your vertex data (loosely, everything where a higher vertex count would have made it look better) and redo the geometry of nearly all of your models.
But even that will do nothing to address the issue that the relevant mathematics is really only studied at a graduate level, and only by students in math or a closely related field (which probably includes physics but probably not statistics, chemistry, computer science, or most (all?) types of engineering).
I was trying to illustrate that whilst your see some of these newer features on current gen consoles they aren't being done in hardware.Sorry I wasn't clear
The real point I was making is that game developers aren't gonna use these features en masse unless they can be used cross platform across the whole video games market bar mobile gaming of course.The next gen of consoles will be able to take advantage of these things so we will finally see progress there...probably take a few years till they start nailing it though.
Of course by the time they do PCs will probably of moved on to add other processes and tricks that won't be used by more than a very few heh.
I use Win 8 pro and the first thing I did is install classic shell. It adds back in the start button we are a custom too. You can set it to look like and behave like classic start, Win XP start, or Win 7. You can also set it to boot directly to the desktop. Here is a link if you are interested. http://www.classicshell.net/ or here http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/ .
Think of new DirectX versions as new tools for building a game. You can do pretty much anything also with an older and inferior toolset, but with new and better tools it's faster and easier to do it and the end result will be a bit better.
It takes also time to learn to use new tools optimally. Release of new DirectX version isn't so much an instant leap to graphics as it is removing technological difficulties and enabling the devs to continue slowly learning how to make better and more impressive graphics.
Ok I skipped from Windows XP (which still is on my old desktop PC) to Windows 8, but by and large I like it. Sure, some stuff is not ideally solved and the Metro UI (that's what it's called, right?) looks slick and nice. But you also can work from the desktop as before, with a bit of tinkering. So yes they made a few odd choices but not the drama I thought it would be. I like the cloud integration, too.
I wonder if Windows 9 even will be so much different?
Ok, the Metro UI is mainly with touch in mind, which seems like a odd choice given I assume that 90% or more use mouse and keyboard and not touch PCs. As I said I dunno Win 7, but Win 8 runs very fast, much faster than my old Win XP. And it is the future. I rather want MS to improve Win 8, as they do now with 8.1. And if you REALLY want the XP UI back, there are Apps which can do that within a minute.
For now I use Win 8 as it is, because I want to learn it, should I ever need that knowledge in work. That's why I dont use any XP lookalike shell. ^^
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
The only thing performance wise between win 7 and win 8 is the boot time is faster. Bet yes, since you came from Win XP, I bet you did notice a huge boost in performance. Besides, you needed something higher the XP since in 2014, MS is killing WIN XP support completely, including new security updates. Glad you like 8. Its not to bad once you get use to where everything is at. I still prefer my classic shell app. I just cant get away from that old start button interface.
There really isn't a difference in a fundamental comparison. The differences are evolutionary and slight. DX 9 to10 reproduces the normal map with more contrast, and improves the bump/normal additive effects from 9. it wasn't that much different, no matter what the 'moar is bettur!1!one!' fanbois say. The REAL difference between DX 9 and 10 was 10 was only available on Vista. Microsofts way of getting gamers to lead the charge onto a new OS. (Because businesses, WON'T)
When Vista flopped they made DX 11 for 7, and this time they added some real differences. Hardware tessellation which allows a more granular rendering of the polygons/triangles all (most commercial) 3D models are constructed from. Unfortunately, since this is on the fly the creation of models that take advantages (other than just performance and minor visual differences) of this feature are slow in coming. It was a hit and miss prospect for a while after DX 11 and we're only now seeing the results.
Next is multicore optimization... sort of. DX 11 can now use all those funky cores your badass rig comes with. The problem? Same as with hard tessellation, the pipeline infrastructure has to catch up. The 3D program has to include the feature (in the case of hard tessellation) or the game engine has to take advantage of it (in the case of multcore support) which again we are only now beginning to see. Strangely enough with the new consoles first (???) but hey that's the way it has worked out so far.
The bottom line of what the difference is between DX 9/10/11? Mostly minor improvements and some fundamental ones that haven't really blossomed yet besides raw performance... and... the fact that they were only available on the next OS microsoft wanted to sell. Which is the biggest difference between 9/10/11... it helped microsoft sell OSes.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
I can see the difference between 40fps and 70fps. I can't see the difference between 70fps and 100fps though. Technically, everyone's eyes are capable of seeing the difference between 40 and 70 fps, it's just that some people have the part of the brain that recognizes things setup to take 40fps and make it look 'right' and some people have nit picky brain parts that couldn't look at monitors that ran at 60hz. >:|
Anyway, I did notice that in The Secret World, the DX11 option renders things considerably faster on the AMD 5770 card. I don't know if that's because DX11 is written better, or if TSW's code is better optimized for DX11.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
DX9.0c was for 10 years the main devlopers choice so logically its have been perfected over the years and they sqeeze every inch out of so games look good.
Now many starting to make DX11 games and in couple of years you will see alot of difference between DX9.0C.
Crysis 3 already looks great and new games in development also look alot better then DX9.
Skyrim looks great but modded it looks awesome, games developed with DX11 looks awesome standard out of the box yammy:)
Mindboggeling jawdropping eyepopping graphics you see in next few years its good times change to DX11 now.
You have no clue what you're talking about. The entire notion of "contrast" in a normal map is complete nonsense. Tessellation kind of changes normal maps in that you need to specify a normal bundle rather than just a normal vector at each vertex, but other than that, normal maps haven't changed in a long time. They were around before programmable shaders, even, and were likely present even in OpenGL 1.0 way back in 1992.
Tessellation basically amounts to procedurally generated vertex data. Done right, it will both increase performance and increase image quality. But you'll need a mathematician on staff to do it right, and even then, enabling artists to design for it is no small task (especially since they tend not to be mathematicians), so I'm not aware of any games that have done it right.
Multicore optimization is done CPU side and mostly has nothing to do with DirectX. The only exception is that DirectX 11 allows multiple CPU cores to communicate with the video card simultaneously without tripping over each other. But there are compelling reasons not to use this unless you're certain that all of your customers will have many CPU cores, which is why the only game to use it that I'm aware of is Civilization V--and may be part of why Civ V has a severe case of badly-coded syndrome.
The fundamental difference that the changes add up to is that some considerable classes of computations can now be efficiently offloaded to the GPU rather than needing to be done on the CPU.