Gaming DirectX 11 performance first look: Dirt 2

Would of loved to see results of 5770 and 5850 as I'd guess both cards would be unplayable with dx11

 

Just updated the article - AMD's tech PR got in touch and has said there is no frame cap. As we said in the article, we weren't sure but you've got to be suspicious when the average is 60fps...

 

Agreed would love to see these benched bit-tech

 

oh dear the AMD anti Nvidia fud train has stalled!

The game looks equivalent in both DX modes imho.Typical AMD not delivering when promising huge things from DX11. I am sure if Nvidia's driver team optimized for DX11 they would do a far better job due to better resources and developer relations. That is if Fermi was not monumentally delayed and looking like the disasater that R600 and NV30 were.

I have harsh words for both hardware manufacturers. I want Intel Larrabee to give Nvidia and AMD their asses on a plate! Thank you



Stalker Call of Pripyat yet another example of AMD not delivering on DX11 and it's so called efficiency...

 

I was expecting a lot more differences than crowds, water and flags tbh, disappointing.

 

It would be interesting to see how the demo ran on a 5770.

There has been a lot of debate as to whether DX11 games would be playable on a 5770. Judging from the results on the 5870 the answer is yes (just) but not at high resolutions.

 

I'm struggling to see much difference in the actual gameplay gfx - sure that video demonstrates it well but thats also 9 > 11 ... anticlimax, farse, ms suck etc

 

Also DIRT 2 is a shame. This is not a DX 11 game at all. They need to make a game for DX11 from the ground up. They can't just add on features like that and expect it to run well.

Also Shattered Horizon doesn't look that good either. Really mediocre. Actually it has the same metal+plastics (on everything, even rocks look like plastic) look that most of their 3D demos used in 3DMark benchmark have.
Is this like Futuremark's trademark or something? Also didn't like the gameplay.

I guess I have more to say about Shattered Horizon than DIRT 2. I have not been able to play Dirt 2 yet.
Wish someone could send me a demo.

 

73 average fps on dx9 with ati 4870 1gb

 

Haha, directx 11 game from the ground up? Dream on guys, we havnt even got a directx 10 one, this is dead before its started =[ Its guna have to be something big to make a leap from 9, We'll have to wait and see what the next generation of consoles are doing ha!

 

We know they are using 64bit colour spaces from this in the article:
“Dirt 2 makes use of high dynamic range (HDR) lighting... in DirectX 9 this is done using the standard fixed point R8G8B8A8 texture format, and therefore the HDR effect is achieved... at the expense of the colour depth of the main scene. In DirectX 11 mode a full floating point R16G16B16A16 texture format is used, and this allows for true over bright colour ranges, while still preserving the colour depth of the main scene. This leads to a general bump in overall rendering quality.”

Yes I agree you can downsample in DX10/11, but the fact is they didn't in the DX11 which increases bandwidth usage and obviously the number of pixels which need have shaders run for them. Again, from the article:
“Dirt 2 utilises post processing techniques to achieve the final image. In DirectX 9 mode some of this post processing is executed at a quarter of the full screen resolution to save on rendering time. In DirectX 11 mode the engine opts for a high quality approach and performs these stages at full screen resolution.”

It's not a 64-bit colour space, it just uses 64 bits, they are actually 16-bit floats (half is the HLSL name) which are not clamped by the rasterizer (real number space), the R8G8B8A8 is actually an integer space which is clamped by the rasterizer from 0 to 255 (there are tricks, such as LogLuv encoding which can encode enough information to do HDR in the integer space, but this encoding/decoding must be done in the pixel shader). My argument isn't that the game is terrible, or the game is a bad port, but we can't just jump to conclusions to say that DX11 is a bad API because some of their design decisions cannot be accelerated further. (DX11 by itself isn't 8x faster than DX9, so you cannot hope to achieve 1:1 performance when the DX11 version requires 8x more computation and bandwidth)

 

is it just me that cant tell the difference between dx9 and dx11 ??????????????

 

DX9 is dead, game over. DX10/11 is where the real Gamers live.

Play Shattered Horizon for a few weeks (long enough to learn how to play) and you will never go back to the flat plain graphics that are dx9.

Yours in ISA Plasma,
Star¤Dagger

 

I can't notice any difference between DX9 and DX11 in Microsoft Office. At all.

It all sounds like a case of the emperor's new clothes to me.

 

Even if they did 16bit or 32 bit channel colors, it is totally useless anyway with all those fancy LCD panels everyone has nowadays.

LCD's can barely display a decent 8bit channel color space! so even if it is 16/32bit channels nobody would notice anyway. And that is a shame of costly GPU resources.

 

It is very subtle, I agree.

The Unigine Heaven benchmark would have been a better example of DX11.

 

I agree. Clippit looks exactly the same to me.

 

Are you saying that I could write a game with an 8 bit colour space, and if people are running an LCD monitor they wouldn't notice if it was any different to a 32 bit colour space?

If this is right, this could save a lot graphics processing power from wasted colour space. Is it really possible to effectively design a game in a 32/64 bit environment, and only use an 8 bit colour depth? How would other display types like projectors differ if the game was only in an 8 bit colour space?

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm very keen on finding out more about graphical efficiencies that can be found by removing unneccesary graphics processing, leaving more room for the essential stuff.

 

i think that making sure we can add more than 4xAA is what we should be focusing on tbh... if anyones tried 8x or 16x AA, you probably notice a lot more than you would chasing the DX10 or 11 or 12 or ..... bandwagon...

Just remember, if we can add more than 4xAA and more than 4XAF, we beat console gamers anyway.. and tbh games imo look so much hotter ramping up the AA and AF into the 8x and above....

 

The water looks rubish. You telling me when a car drives through water there are no splashes, just ripples and a little wave. Although it may be an improvement over water in DX10/9 it doesnt look all that different.
Expecially as you lose all those FPS for not much difference