News Microsoft confirms DirectX 11.2 is a Windows 8.1, Xbox One exclusive

There is a slight performance increase in 8 over 7 from what I've seen. But if I'm going to make the jump I didn't personally want to do it if 8 was going to be outmoded by blue or 8.1 in a few months time.

I think to me, 8 is as Vista/ME.

Like you, I'll try it, and if all goes well, I'll stick with it.

 

Actually, the PS4 does support DX11, part of the whole point of going x86 was to make it easier for developers to implement games on PC and console, doing that but not allowing DirectX support would negate that reasoning somewhat.
I believe Sony announced this at the GDC earlier this year. Wonder how much they're paying Microsoft to be able to use it with the Orbis OS.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/...4s-hardware-power-controller-features-at-gdc/

http://gematsu.com/2013/03/sony-shares-new-ps4-details-at-gdc

 

I guess it will be included in windows 9 so ill just buy that and save the hassle thanks anyway.

It will be 3-4 years before 11.2 games are around direct x 10 has bearly hit widespread let alone 11. Most games released still include a direct x 9 API and have done since along time, Theres very few windows 7 only games as your cutting off a large portion of your market by doing it. There will be even less windows 8.1 games unless a developer wants to go bankrupt. ( ignoring 95% of the market would be amounting to such a thing)

 

yawn

 

BF3 being the exception.

 

so, if you read the above comments from Buster, you'll see that for once, there will (possibly) be a more unified approach to Graphics APIs across the consoles. I don't think a studio is going to go bust because they want to support a DX11.2 feature... especially if it infers no hardware compliance above what is there already for 11 which is where we are now. So we could imply they should be aiming for that as a feature set at least already (read as: (I'm extrapolating) it might further unify their development approach especially if the idea is for Sony to tool up the PS4 for parity where possible - which would allow studios to release PC versions for less money than before rather than risking going bust with DX11/10 etc)

I'd hazard the DX9 thing was mainly because the GPU in the PS3 was not of the unified variety and required more tools to be made by Sony. I'm not educated on this though so these are useless ramblings...

P.s. I don't think they are going to waive any magic wands or anything; just flexibility seems to be on the agenda this time round.

 

As 8.1 is/will be a free upgrade 8 wont be outmoded in a few months, it will just be replaced.
Maybe best to think of Windows 8 as a public beta and 8.1 as the way it should have been 8 months ago.

According to the Steam hardware survey 30.35% are DX10, 43.6% are DX11 and more and more games are being made that are not compatible with XP, games like BioShock Infinite, XCOM, Crysis 3 and this list is only going to grow over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support#Upcoming_games
But i do agree it will be a long time for 11.2 to take off, if ever.

 

That's actually spot on.

About three months back (shortly after going SLI) I was in CEX one day and I saw NFS : Shift for £2. I thought hmm, not played that much (I tried it ages ago with 5770CFX but CFX was crap).

Any way, installed it and cranked on the settings and put on 8XMSAA. At the time I only had 4gb ram in my system (used to be a 6gb tri channel kit). Loaded up the game and the Nvidia drivers put a message across the screen in red writing saying something along the lines of "Not enough memory for your chosen aliasing setting. Please reduce your settings, your setting has not been applied".

That was the first time I had ever seen 4gb of memory fall short. I bought an 8gb kit and sure enough, message gone.

So yes, it seems that Nvidia cards at least can dip into your ram when needed. Which may also explain why 8XMSAA comes at such a huge performance hit.

 

xD ... as always with Microsoft. I wish we could see more openGL based games.

 

Because alienating half your customer base is good for business, for real.

Still, not a single **** was given.

 

They'll do what they did with DX11 and back down. It was to be a 7 exclusive yet ended up on Vista any way.

 

Question is then, can the DirectX binaries from the PS4 be extracted and reverse engineered to run on Linux, giving Wine a huge performance and compatability boost. Theoretically a FreeBSD binary can run on Linux with a relatively small amount of emulation. As such if the DirectX implementation isn't combined directly with the driver, porting it may be possible.

 

Unifying the code structure across platforms is a wonderful thing for the developers. Building this as a feature set into the games is great for customers who make the plunge. So win-win on all sides. Advertising it like this, however, and restricting it to 8.1 "blue" and XBox One is a d*ck move.

Agree wtih AlienwareAndy ... they'll back down. And if they don't, none of us sticking with Win7 will notice a change in the games we're playing, or the games coming out.

I do like the idea of a future where the GPU simply taps into available system RAM more directly, and carves out a portion to be restricted for its own use. There's always the fear of performance hit that integrated graphics have, along with shared memory, on laptops without dedicated GPUs. But I think that if the physical architecture of the mobo / OS gets planned out properly, we won't have to spend $800 on high-end cards anymore, as those cards won't need 4GB GDDR5 or whatever. We can have a massive store of RAM to be used as necessary. And with the rise of SSDs taking over for standard storage, you don't see the RAM cache requirement like you used to.

So, 11.2 can be a good thing ... if MS doesn't d*ck it up.

-J

 

AMD has been supporting this feature in OpenGL for over a year. They call it Partially Resident Textures. CUDA has also been supporting something similar with there unified virtual addressing since CUDA 4.0. So hardware / driver support is already there for the most part.

Also I think the point Sony is making is that they support the D3D 11.1 feature set, not that they support D3D. D3D is very much integrated into the windows sdk, and I doubt there has been a port made for bsd/ps4.

 

Well that's the current gen GPUs all out of date then.

Glad I waited before upgrading my PC, will have to stay with my ageing 570s for a little while longer until a DX11.2 GPU is released.

 

Iirc AMD allready support it in OGL

 

I'd like motherboard with 2 sockets : 1 for CPU and 1 for GPU, both sharing the same memory banks through unified memory space. But that will never happens since it would mean the death of video cards.

 

If you want to use all of the features of DX11.2 you'll have to get Windows 8, patched to 8.1.

And it is a must as Xbox1 will have it, and most PC games are console ports. Oh and an 8-Core AMD CPU, seeing as new games will be developed for the AMD 8-core architecture, (both PS4 and Xbox1 are AMD based). Just thought I'd mention it. =)

Developers certainly wont be thinking about Intel PC users, when they're making games for PS4 and Xbox1, and will just knock them out to PC, and you will take your chances on how well they will run.

I know what platform I'm sticking with.

 

So they say, but will it be 100% support on current GPUs, as in every feature? I want to be certain before buying a new GPU, just in case.