The State of DirectX 11 - Image Quality and Performance

[mobilenvidia]

One day us Notebook owners will also get to enjoy DX11.

Hopefully the 400M series GPU's will surface soon, but looks to be a in time for XMAS release.

HotHardWare have done a write up on their experiences with DX11, should be of interest to the gamers out there.

Touted as one of the biggest milestones in Windows games development in recent years, DirectX 10 ultimately didn't live up to the hype as far as end-users were concerned. A large part of the disappointment was perhaps due to a misunderstanding of what DirectX 10 was supposed to be. DirectX 10 was a fundamental refresh of the entire API and it brought a much-needed reboot to an aging API model. The reboot removed a lot of the legacy clutter left over from over a decade of previous DirectX developments. DirectX 10 was never really about the end users at all, it was really about the developers.

It also didn't help that DirectX 10 was tied to Windows Vista, which was unpopular with gamers from launch. On top of that, due to the revamped API model which required developers to adjust how they programmed games, DirectX 10 received sluggish developer adoption. Considering the lukewarm reception DirectX 10 received a few short years ago, it isn't too surprising that many gamers are now approaching DirectX 11 with some caution.

Whole article can be found here

[Soor]

One day us Notebook owners will also get to enjoy DX11.

Or right now, if you're willing to forgo the self-destructive marketing-implanted impulse towards corporate brand loyalty :)

Zaibatsus don't care if you're loyal.

Back to topic, its a well-done article, although the conclusion is fairly foregone: until devs start really flexing those DirectCompute muscles - instead of just offloading pre-existing post-processing - all you get out of DX11 is better shadows and lighting.

I can also tell you what techs will be overdone in the next couple of years - unnecessary tessellation all over the place (honestly, once textured and pixel-shaded you can't tell unless its water or cloth, with the right texture maps), and ludicrous Depth of Field effects up the wazoo :P

With that in mind, we should pitch a high-speed adrenaline-filled capture-the-flag-on-jetskis game to some big publisher! :)

[Guest Robbo99]

Or right now, if you're willing to forgo the self-destructive marketing-implanted impulse towards corporate brand loyalty :)

Zaibatsus don't care if you're loyal.

Back to topic, its a well-done article, although the conclusion is fairly foregone: until devs start really flexing those DirectCompute muscles - instead of just offloading pre-existing post-processing - all you get out of DX11 is better shadows and lighting.

I can also tell you what techs will be overdone in the next couple of years - unnecessary tessellation all over the place (honestly, once textured and pixel-shaded you can't tell unless its water or cloth, with the right texture maps), and ludicrous Depth of Field effects up the wazoo :P

With that in mind, we should pitch a high-speed adrenaline-filled capture-the-flag-on-jetskis game to some big publisher! :)

I agree with you, it sounds good on paper, but I don't think it translates into wildly better visuals in-game. But, sometimes it takes a few small gains over time to make a significant effect, so at least they're moving in the right direction (maybe in a few years these incremental improvements will result on almost photo-realistic gaming)!!