DirectX 11 Created 14 years ago2010-04-02 16:41:28 UTC by Unbreakable

Man I've been waiting forever for the new G10 cards to come out, and the Nvidia GTX 480 is only $700 (roughly)

This card and the 470 are the first to be realeased by Nvidia that can run with DirectX 11... which all of you should know, that this means
TESSALLATION!

And for those of you who don't know what that means, I'm so full of
excitement that I posted a video on youtube about this--->

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKNydSVunbE

I don't really get DX11 tessellation. From what I gather, it takes a height map then subdivides the polygons in a model and reworks the model's mesh to match the height map.

So it builds an incredibly high poly-mesh based on a height map. Isn't the whole purpose of height maps to avoid unnecessarily high-poly meshes?

Farewell normal maps, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

This looks pretty nice too.

ati 5750 or 5770 149 and 199ish.

You will not notice any difference than a $700 card.

True that the new nvidia's have some major benes (wtfati128bit) to them, but not worth the sticker price just yet.

GTX 480 is overpriced even though it's better than any single-gpu ATI video card, but the difference doesn't justify the price. To make mathers worse, it's a jetplane in your PC: high temperatures and high power consumption.

Nice video. Did you use Magix for the music?

I do think Tesselation has other purposes not only those presented in the video, and normal maps will still be used... at least for a while.
First time I heard of Tesselation was in 2007, I think.

Farewell normal maps, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

It's going to be a long time before normal maps are considered obsolete.

So it builds an incredibly high poly-mesh based on a height map. Isn't the whole purpose of height maps to avoid unnecessarily high-poly meshes?

Overdependance on normal/ss/height maps can be ugly. I think Bioshock is a good example of that. A lot of the textures are fairly low-res with deep normals and it makes a lot of things look plastic.

Tesselation is exciting (well I think so, anyway) because developers can put a lot more actual 3D detail into geometry/characters, and it will all behave like a much more effective, huge LOD system. Your card won't be rendering these smaller details at a distance where you can't even pick up on them yourself.

DirectX 11 should be better than DirectX 10 performance wise, although I can't really say much as I haven't seen how smoothly games have been said to run under DirectX 11 nor seen a comparison to DirectX 10; in other words a benchmark. Tesselation is one feature I am looking forward to seeing (after looking at the Unigine demo and DiRT 2) as it will bring a high level of detail to games should developers use it.

I'm with Striker on this one; concerning the GTX 4xx series. Despite nVidia having the GTX 4xx series which includes more features than the Ati counterparts (PhysX, CUDA, etc), I doubt a price tag $200-300 higher than the Ati 5xxx series is going to have the majority of consumers buying it, let alone want them to have

a jetplane

in their PC. Until nVidia drops the price on this, reduces the amount of heat it creates and somehow manages to reduce power consumption, Ati in my view is currently leading the market in terms of DirectX 11 GPU's; more affordable and more importantly doesn't run like a jet plane.

Whats your thoughts on the fastest; Radeon 5970.. its got 2GB Memory, with 2 gpu's.. For the price of like $700 I think its a rather good deal

I think I have to get some money from the bank to buy it.

DirectX is, in one word, bullshit. Tesselation's been around forever on OGL. As usual, with commercial products, it is a lame attempt to push existing technology onto users claiming it's innovative.

In fact, polygons are also bullshit. Sorry to say, corporate interests ruin inventiveness.

I'm still a bit shady about that unlimited detail stuff. A Voxel system like that cant do as much with lighting like polygons can, so I dont know that I care for it. You can make something as detailed as you want but if the lighting sucks then eh -_-.

Unlimited Detail is not voxel based but ok.

I've seen that unlimited detail thing a few times now, I'll believe it when I actually see it working. I have high hopes, but until I get a live demo that dosen't look like shit, I'm doubtful. There's doubts around how it would work with physics, shaders, and the like.

I've seen weirder stuff that Unlimited Detail. A German thing called Workzeug or something like that was revolutionary in procedural graphics. About 7 years ago there was a game that looked like Halo 2 and was only 65kb in size. I've seen it and was amazed.

This unlimited detail stuff has similar technology that has been in use for years in the architectural world. Even though ts all nice, I still say that animation and dynamics like physics and pixel shaders are going to suffer.

...and shit, why haven't NURBS replaced polygons yet? A NURBS is a fraction of the size of a standard normalized polygon anyway.

... NURBS mean Non-Uniform Rational Boolean Spline. Its vectors with the space in the middle filled in mathematically. It takes only 2 nurbs to make a perfect sphere.

Filling in the middle would probably require shitloads of processing data, Rim.

Impressed by the Unlimited Detail thing though, looking forward to more. And yeah, physics, shading & any dynamic lighting/deformation might be problematic to pull off.

I think the biggest problem is just how important polygon tech is in the industry right now, and how efficient people are getting with it. I don't pretend to understand how much effort it would take, but I can't see any company just making the switch to this technology any time soon.

Devs have spent who knows how long optimising all this up to the level it is now (trying get the most of stagnant console power), if this Unlimited Detail thing means starting from scratch, or significant rewrites... nobody is going to want to that.

Thank you very much THWL. I now have a lot of hours of studying on Wikipedia ahead me .

About 7 years ago there was a game that looked like Halo 2 and was only 65kb in size. I've seen it and was amazed.

.werkzeug (although I believe the game I first played was .kkrieger), the 96kb game. Impressive, but it most certainly doesn't look like Halo 2. Or play like it.

As Strideh said, too much of the 3D graphics industry is tied down with polygons. Big money means little innovation. As always.

Either case, Dx11 (and, well, DirectX in general) is incredibly unimpressive. It's naught more but an API, made to promote games on Windows by Microsoft.

I quote my original link:

As John Carmack said when asked if Rage was a DirectX game, "It?s still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. It?s interesting how little of the technology cares what API you?re using and what generation of the technology you?re on. You?ve got a small handful of files that care about what API they?re on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they?re on."

Yes! I played .kkrieger a couple of times. Unfortunately there's no save feature, so if you quit to get back later you're screwed. It looked great, but my computer can't quite keep up with it.

I played krieger too and I have to say, it's impressive from the point of view of the textures and custom sounds. But everything else takes space: that's DX.
Which makes me think why other games have to be ridiculously big like a couple of gb.

Textures and (I think) geometry in .werkzeug is procedurally generated, meaning it's generated on runtime instead of being saved on the hard drive. Ergo, less space used. I imagine it's not equally friendly to the CPU though .

Ha! You found it! Been looking for that.

Yeah doesn't look as good as I remember. But still its old and I thought it was pretty when I saw it for the first time.

Anyway, I do like the unlimited detail stuff. ZBrush fags will love it if things become more sculptural and painterly.

on a slightly related note, dirt 2 (and grid which is on the same engine) is currently 75% off on steam. it was one of the first games to include dx11 features and is a brilliant game in its own right. give it a go if you've got any sort of interest in racing games and/or gorgeous environments.