Why DX10.1 matters to youLike speed and beauty?By Charlie Demerjian: Friday, 16 November 2007, 10:24 AMYOU KNOW THE graphics wars are heating up when the 'presentations' start to fly. The latest one is from NV talking about their upcoming 8800GT/256 which will be out soon, but it is the header that makes me think it is more than innocent advertising."Kevin Unangst, Senior Global Director for Microsoft Games for Windows: " DX10.1 is an incremental update that won’t affect any games or gamers in the near future." He is right, mostly because it won't be out until SP1 hits, so no argument there. More importantly, DX10 and onward is tied to the broken malware infestation known as Vista, so it is really irrelevant, but there is more to it than that.Lets be honest, DX10.1 brings a lot of new features that don't really matter much if at all, and you can read all about them here. That said, there is one there that will matter a lot, contrary to what MS people say. This magic feature is the multi-sample buffer reads and writes(MSBRW). If you are wondering how you missed that big one in the feature list, well shame on you, read better next time.What MSBRW does is quite simple, it gives shaders access to depth and info for all samples without having to resolve the whole pixel. Get it now? No? OK, we'll go into a bit more detail. DX10 forced you to compute a pixel for AA (or MSAA) to be functional, and this basically destroyed the underlying samples. The data was gone, and to be honest, there was no need for it to be kept around.Games like Quake3 would do a lighting pass, then a shader pass, and another lighting followed by shaders and so on until everything was rendered right. This was quite precise but also quite slow. Dog slow.To optimize around this, a technique called deferred shading took was invented. This does all the lighting passes followed by a single shader pass. If you have five passes, you basically can skip four trips through the shaders. The problem? Because the pixel isn't fully computed, just a pile of AA data, there is no way for it to be read. This is horribly simplified, but I don't want to go into the low level stuff here, go look it up if you really care.What this meant is that you can't turn on AA if you have deferred rendering unless you do Supersampling which is rendering it at higher reolutions and sampling down. This is unusably slow, so it went out the door, meaning if you were designing a game, you picked speed in the form of deferred shading, or beauty in the form of AA. Most DX10 games will go for speed, meaning the AA hardware will sit more or less idle.DX10.1 brings the ability to read those sub-samples to the party via MSBRW. To the end user, this means that once DX10.1 hits, you can click the AA button on your shiny new game and have it actually do something. This is hugely important.The first reaction most people have is that if a game is written for DX10, then new 10.1 features won't do anything, AA awareness needs to be coded in the engine. That would be correct, but we are told it is quite patchable, IE you will probably see upgrades like the famous 'Chuck patch' for Oblivion. Nothing is guaranteed, but there is a very good chance that most engines will have an upgrade available.In the end, DX10.1 is mostly fluff with an 800-pound gorilla hiding among the short cropped grass. MSBRW will enable AA and deferred shading, so you can have speed and beauty at the same time, not a bad trade-off.Since NV has not done the usual 'we can do it too' song and dance when they are being beaten about the head and neck by a bullet point feature they don't have, you can be pretty sure they can't do it.Close looks at the drivers, and more tellingly no PR trumpeting that they will have it out before the release of SP1 almost assuredly means that it will never happen. If you have a G8x or a G9x card, the only feature of DX10.1 you will miss is the important one. µ
Nvidia's 8800M GTX mobile chip runs Crysis, shockaYou did see the new graphics chip, right?By Wily Ferret: Tuesday, 20 November 2007, 12:20 PMYOU MIGHT NOT HAVE NOTICED, but yesterday Nvidia launched its new mobile graphics chip, the 8800M GTX. Whilst the release may have gotten buried under the weight of Intel and AMD reviews, its actually probably more interesting than either of those two big dogs.AMD Spider was, by all accounts, a disappointment, and the Intel quad-core release was barely a speed bump. The new 8800M GTX, on the other hand, is actually a rather good bit of kit, it seems. The number of stream processors is now at 96, up 3x from the previous top of the range kit - the 8600 M - which had 32. The memory interface is now 256-bit, which also accounts for a massive increase in frame rates in the latest games.Perhaps the most striking indication of the performance is in this video review which shows the 8600M and the new 8800M side by side benchmarking Crysis. The 8600 is barely more than a slideshow, whilst the 8800 rips through the benchmark like hot butter, as Steve Jobs would say. If a picture is worth a thousand words, we suspect a video is worth at least two Excel charts.As you'd expect, then, all the usual suspects are lining up to add in 8800 GTX mobile parts to their lineup, including Alienware and the UK's very own Rock. If you're after a gaming notebook, it looks like this is the one to have. µ
Wintry yuh mc ! you said i was aoob when i claimed i would be getting at least an 8800GTX performing card in a years time, for around 200 US.. you told me it would take at least two years..
Arc... you changing hardware like a 'worker' from Villas I would imagine does change latex.... wtmc?? yuh selling organs like in Turista oh wha?
I working too, yuh doh seem me changing hardware like chain smoker changes fags. And not only that HOW he get his hands on a 8800GT when LARGE online Etailers like newegg cyah keep stock for more than a few minutes???
it reach in yuh hands yet me boy? we waits for the benchies urgently!
lets just say that I may not be upgrading anything until next year this same time.Ah putting all that OT money I work hard for this year to good use. There's nothing like seeing a tangibleresult of the fruits of your labour.
ok where you got that gt man?!!!
Quote from: Prowl on November 21, 2007, 12:29:43 PMok where you got that gt man?!!!He said AMAZON.COM
