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Resinence wrote:I would also recommend at least getting a 7series, though an 8series is better in the long run with m$ holding a gun to gamers heads over dx10.

MKSheppard wrote:Is it Vista Only? Then it's a scam.

Ace Pace wrote:Right, because being dependent on an entirely new display model/driver model which is quite complicated to backport to XP, is obviously a marketing scam. Get over yourself.

Right, because being dependent on an entirely new display model/driver model which is quite complicated to backport to XP, is obviously a marketing scam. Get over yourself.

Tolya wrote:

Right, because being dependent on an entirely new display model/driver model which is quite complicated to backport to XP, is obviously a marketing scam. Get over yourself.

How do you know that such a backport is so complicated? Like Shep said, we went from 1.0 to 9.0c on 95/98 and it wasnt a big deal.
That said, I still would like to hear what's so breathtakingly new about DX10 that does not allow it to run on XP.

Pu-239 wrote:Well, the fact that DX10 features are accessible using OpenGL vendor specific extensions... (well, w/ nVidia- ATi sucks anyway (yeah, I'm well aware of the pain required for developer to use extensions) yeah, it's a scam (somewhat) -- - the point is that DX10 could have been made as an incremential upgrade.

Tolya wrote:How do you know that such a backport is so complicated? Like Shep said, we went from 1.0 to 9.0c on 95/98 and it wasnt a big deal.

The highest DirectX version to run on Win9x was DX8, not v9.

Tolya wrote:

The highest DirectX version to run on Win9x was DX8, not v9.

My mistake, but the point is still valid.

To understand what is new about WDDM, we should first examine how graphics drivers currently work circa Windows XP. At present, the vast majority of the graphics driver resides in the Operating System's kernel space, where it can communicate directly with the graphics hardware in the system, with only a small portion (as well as the OpenGL component of the driver) utilising the user space which does not have this direct access to the hardware. This doesn't seem particularly problematic in itself, until you consider that an error in the driver inside the OSes kernel space can cause the entire system to crash and hang, which is never a satisfactory state of affairs. You can see a diagram showing ATI's current graphics driver model below.



Under the new WDDM driver model, as much of the driver as possible has been moved into the user space, to keep it isolated from the Operating System itself. To do this, a WDDM driver is basically split into two components - The UMD (User Mode Driver) and KMD (Kernel Mode Driver). ATI's WDDM drivers will be made up of several UMDs - One for DirectX, one for OpenGL, and another for DXVA (for video playback acceleration). Each of these drivers are kept completely seprate from both the KMD and the graphics hardware itself. In addition to this, several UMDs can be run at once, with one used per application - Thus, if one User Mode Driver crashes, it will only affect the application using that driver, and other applications (and indeed the Operating System) will remain unaffected. Indeed, this is much like the way applications tend to work - Try opening up a number of Internet Explorer windows, then have one of them crash... Only the affected application window will close, leaving the rest still running. This improvement is especially important under Windows Vista due to its use of Direct 3D to render the desktop - Without this new scheme, if a graphics driver error caused then entire graphics subsystem to crash, it would take not just the game or application down, but the entire Operating System with it! To compare to the current driver situation, check out ATI's rendition of a WDDM-based driver below.



Aside from that major change, there are also other differences to certain aspects of the driver. ATI have had some crash recovery abilities in their CATALYST drivers for some time, but this has now been taken into the Operating System itself under Windows Vista, where it will detect if the graphics hardware or Kernel Mode Driver has encountered an error, and then instruct the graphics driver to reset the GPU and recover the situation gracefully.

In a similar vein, management of graphics board memory has also moved from the graphics driver itself to being handled by the Operating System as part of the WDDM driver model, as indeed has the prioritisation and management of the GPU's workload.

Xon wrote:

Tolya wrote:

The highest DirectX version to run on Win9x was DX8, not v9.

My mistake, but the point is still valid.

Not even close.

The technological difference between v8 & v9 is huge for graphics. The transition from a purely fixed pipeline to a programable pipeline is mindbogglingly huge.

And there is a very clear and big difference between DX8 and DX9 level graphics.

Crazy_Vasey wrote:
Direct3D 8 was not purely fixed function. It had both vertex shaders and pixel shaders even if they were considerably less pleasant to use and less advanced than they are in Direct3D 9. Don't you remember the hype of the time? It was quite a big deal that support was. As I recall, the differences between 8 and 9 were mostly in the addition of v2 of the shaders and the HLSL.

DirectX 9 is a complex beast, but its highlights include:

More precision everywhere — The watchword for DX9 is precision, as you might have gathered by now. DX9 calls for larger, floating-point datatypes throughout the rendering pipeline, from texture storage to pixel shaders, from the Z-buffers to the frame buffers. 128-bit floating-point color precision is the most complex color mode, but the DX9 spec calls for a range of color formats, including 32, 40, and 64-bit integer modes (with red, green, blue, and alpha channels of 8:8:8:8, 10:10:10:10, and 16:16:16:16), plus 16 and 32-bit floating-point modes.

The additional precision will, of course, help with color fidelity and dynamic range, but it will also help with visual quality in other ways. For example, depth-handling errors will be dramatically reduced with the addition of floating-point Z buffers. Bump mapping elevations will increase (and quantization error will be reduced) with added precision for normal maps.

Pixel shader 2.0 — DX9 pixel shaders will take steps toward general programmability while exposing more detail about a chip's underlying capabilities. Since high-level shader languages may compile to DX9 API calls, these changes make sense. At the same time, DX9 pixel shaders will offer floating-point precision. These new pixel shaders incorporate a number of powerful vector and scalar instructions, including log, exponent, power, and reciprocal.

DX9 pixel shaders should be able to intermix as many as 32 texture address operations and 64 math operations arbitrarily. That is, they will be able to execute 32 address and 64 math operations in a single rendering pass, without having to resort to multipass rendering. With this kind of power, reasonably complex shader effects should be possible in only one or two passes.

Vertex shader 2.0 — Vertex shaders aren't as dramatically improved in DX9 as pixel shaders, but they do gain one powerful improvement: flow control. In this iteration, vertex shaders gain the ability to handle vertex programs with jumps, loops, and subroutines. Vertex shader units will add more registers and constants in order to make that happen. Improved flow control will allow for much more efficient vertex programs that reuse code and the like.

Higher-order surface handling improvements — DX9 adds several new tricks to its arsenal here. Displacement mapping is similar to bump mapping, but it actually modifies the geometry of an object, adding real polygon detail. Bump mapping just fakes it with lighting. Microsoft is working on tools to take a high polygon model (say, for a game character) and generate a a low-poly model and a displacement map for it. When mated up again on the other side of the AGP bus, these two elements could create a high-poly model yet again—much more efficient than sending the whole high-poly model over the bus.

DX9 also brings adaptive tessellation to displacement maps and other models, and does so with floating-point precision. This ability to cut out unneeded polygon detail as objects move away from the viewer will allow more complex scenes to be rendered faster.

Multiple render targets — Chips should be able to perform pixel shader operations on multiple color buffers at once. ATI has demonstrated this ability on the R300, rendering several copies of a race car model with several different colors of paint but the same, shiny gloss.

Improved gamma correction — Now that the pixel pipeline is more precise, DX9 includes some provisions for handling gamma correction properly, at least in the pixel shaders. Better gamma handling will help with tuning output brightness while preserving dynamic range.

MKSheppard wrote:I recently within the last year spent $200 to upgrade to Windows XP Pro; why the fuck should I need to upgrade to a horribly untested Microsoft Operating System just so I can play the latest DX10 games?

We went from Direct X 1.0 to 8.0 for Windows 95 and from Direct X 5.2 to 9.0c for Win 98; so what is so smashingly new/great about DX 10 that it needs to be exclusive to Vista?

Ace Pace wrote:Lots of stuff; too much to quote.

RThurmont wrote:As I see it, DirectX 10 is an ultimately worthless technology, even though it is innovative and interesting.

Before 2002, it seemed like interesting, innovative games were coming out every month, and now, since then, there have been relatively few, and a good chunk of those have merely been sequels to previous games with better graphics.

The "genrealization" of gaming, where the focus shifts to producing relatively homogenous games that are updated frequently, with each consecutive version featuring improvements in graphics and in other areas, makes for a relatively stable business model, but is ultimately ridiculously boring.

I would personally rather that game developers used OpenGL and produced games that looked like they were made in 2001,

had interesting and innovative gameplay,

The increasing popularity of consoles is another problem.... ...in the DOS era, when you started a game, it was pretty much the only thing running, and admittedly, that's an obsolete approach

but I find that when gaming on Windows, especially with a live internet connection, the distractions are constant.

RThurmont wrote:As I see it, DirectX 10 is an ultimately worthless technology, even though it is innovative and interesting.

MKSheppard wrote:Do we really need to completely tear out the entire guts of the system, when in reality the majority of this stuff can be accomplished with the present driver architecture?