Gaming DirectX 11 performance first look: Dirt 2

With the current lull in PC development, I'm starting to wonder if this DirectX11 über-game will ever arrive. And if it does, will it be more than just a tarted up tech demo (yes, I'm looking at you Shattered Horizon)?

I've been flamed on this forum before for even daring to mention the slump in PC-gaming, but fact of the matter is, with the current console generation being extended almost indefinitely (thanks recession) I don't see developers having the motivation to invest the time, effort and - most importantly - finances needed to usher in DirectX11.

What made consoles feel 'old' was when games like Crysis would come along and embarrass the current generation into submission. But seeing as Crytek themselves have become somewhat of a cautionary tale within the industry, and with no obvious successor, I don't see this happening for a long while.

Some smart dude on the bit-tech podcast (sorry, I can't put names to voices yet) mentioned how it's very possible NVIDIA's GeForce deparment could soon be overshadowed by partnership deals involving Tesla and Tegra, effectively pushing their interest further and further away from the desktop GPU market. Couple that with the paradigm shift from PC gaming dragging along consoles to consoles being the driving sales force and things start to look grim.

I'm not trying to say that PC games won't always look better, but to what degree and how soon is definitely up for debate.

 

Seems I still rather take the better frame rates with DX9, I had to look real hard to notice any difference on screenshots, and for that I'd be giving up 30 fps min frame rate?

I think not.

Ok, shadows seem somewhat smoother, but would one really even notice them while gaming?

 

the water effects looks amazing in replay mode

 

The screenshots in the article is showing 2 different generations of graphics processing that are 3 generations apart right?

I am having a hard time telling the difference. The water does look better though.

 

I know it's only 1 small article but it reminds me of the DX10 first impressions.

 

hmmmm moving crowd, nice water ripples and more realistic flag movements........cant physx do that? Very disappointed. Was hoping that the efficency of DX11 would be a major thing. It looks the bloody same as DX9 plus a 40% chunk of fps missing to boot. Until developers stop pissing about whats the point? All features that both physx and in this case of DX11 its all gimmiks that add nothing to game play. In the case of DX11, it becomes more efficient than DX9 and 10 or adds visual splendor its wasted. Why can't real time collisions, damage be done using physx? who really gives a **** if random bits of paper flutter about. Pretty yes....useful no.

Sorry for the rant. Whens the next DX11 game out?

 

Nice, and yes DX11 isn't the DX10 saver it was meant to be, yet.... give it time.

 

javaman - gameplay-influencing decisions aren't going to get offloaded to hardware accelerators until developers can be sure that most of their users have capable hardware. With PhysX, acceleration is pretty much limited to Nvidia hardware sadly. However with a graphics API written for OpenCL (or DirectCompute) nobody's hardware will be "locked out" as long as it supports OpenCL (or DX11). That's one thing I really like about AMD's direction right now: they're bringing Havok to OpenCL so anyone who wants to use it can use it. Maybe they realize they don't have enough marketshare to push a proprietary API (like PhysX) but hopefully that's for the better.

 

The water is improved a little bit, and the ambient occlusion is nice, but extremely subtle, especially in a racing game. Overall, the benefits of DirectX 11 here are few and totally do not warrant the performance hit. Reminds me of Company of Heroes a few years ago, with its DirectX 10 support that still, after multiple patches, cuts framerates by at least 50% and adds almost nothing to image quality. The upcoming Alien game looks promising, but I won't hold my breath.

One thing that needs to be pointed out is that full-dynamic range lighting is a massive benefit, but it's not noticeable with the way their game has been built. Ever heard of crushed whites and blacks? It's a result of sacrifices to exposure levels, and occurs in lots of HDR-capable games, including Half-Life 2. Here's an example of some crushed whites in Modern Warfare 2:

http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/8/3/8/5/7/7/WhiteCrush_01_360.jpg.jpg

It's pretty obvious there that while there is some bloom/HDR going on, it's at the expense of a lot of the texture detail in the scene. Having a full range for the lighting means that detail can still be retained in the scene even in extreme levels of light and dark.

 

Always makes me laugh.

 

Yea, I know thats the problem with physX. Im just a little annoyed in general that games physics could be so much better. Even if physX offered improved physics on top of normal in game physics rather than just random cloth movement etc.

 

DX11 is a superset of DX10 so as another poster pointed out DX10 cards will be able to run in dx11 mode without the tesselation and one or two other features. For example parallel rendering which is a DX11 feature can be successfully run on dx10 hardware.

You have to understand that the jump from dx9 to dx10 was massive, a lot of old techniques are now inefficient, but try getting a developer working in dx8/dx9 for the last 6+ years to now embrace a completely different programming paradigm isn't easy. Most dx10 titles were simple conversions of the renderer to dx10, who knows if they properly rewrote them or just did things in the old and inefficient manner.

I cant help but think that dx11 in DIRT is simply an attempt to cash in on being the one of the first DX11 titles and they hacked on the tessellation functions...

Seeing as battleforge experienced a ~38% performance increase from moving over to DX11 (http://www.driverheaven.net/articles.php?articleid=140&pageid=4), i find it weird that DIRT would lose 30+% just for 2 added features, i cant help but think that the dx10 version is a bad port, and I speak as a graphics programmer, there should technically be absolutely 0 performance decrease moving from dx9 to dx10 to dx11 if done properly, technically dx10 should be faster as there are much less state changes required due to the improved state objects system, but to fully utilize that you would need to completely change the rendering order of objects...

The rendering of objects and the spatial data storage is often relegated to the game engine and if the game engine isn't designed with dx10 in mind, there may be a large performance hit due to excessive and unnecessary state changes during rendering, especially if the game engine uses a scene graph for rendering...

 

my demo crashes on launch

am i missing anything? i know Grid won't work properly with a core i7 due to HT and 4 cores messes up its scheduling system, can't seem to find a fix for Dirt 2.

edit: it works after a driver update....... sneaking nVidia, can't find any 195.55 on their website any more, pretending 195.62 was there all along.

 

And what refresh rate do most people run at? 60fps!

 

it said 12.04.09 for me last night when I checked.

 

and how many people turn vsync off? I for one do since i cant handle the mouse lag it introduces!

 

100% agree here; and for me what makes me even more annoyed is that Codemasters forgot about the massive DX10 market! Why only choose DX9 and, what must be, a very small DX11 market????

 

Console market + ATI funded DX11 features that people will upgrade to.

As Tim said, DX10 is a subset of 11, but we're not quite sure yet if Codemasters enable DX10 cards to run "most" of 11 or roll back to DX9.

Also, does it really matter for a bit of tessellation? Most games are still 9.0c anyway.

 

Having bought gfx cards for Pc's for the last 13yrs, one thing has always been true.....the 1st generation of cards made for a new DX version, are never fast enough to truly run all the features.

Always best to wait for the 1st refresh of a range before upgrading......

 

I found your post pretty funny. Does any of what you say really matter when the minimium frame rates are so high. Without a frame rate counter on are you really going to notice that while playing the game.