Introducing DirectX 11: The Pipeline and Features
This is DirectX 10.
We all remember him from our G80 launch article back in the day when no one knew how much Vista would really suck. Some of the shortfalls of DirectX 10 have been in operating system support, driver support, time to market issues, and other unfortunate roadblocks that kept developers from making full use of all the cool new features and tools DirectX 10 brought.
Meet DirectX 11.
She's much cooler than her older brother, and way hotter too. Many under-the-hood enhancements mean higher performance for features available but less used under DX10. The major changes to the pipeline mark revolutionary steps in graphics hardware and software capabilities. Tessellation (made up of the hull shader, tessellator and domain shader) and the Compute Shader are major developments that could go far in assisting developers in closing the gap between reality and unreality. These features have gotten a lot of press already, but we feel the key to DirectX 11 adoption (and thus exploitation) is in some of the more subtle elements. But we'll get in to all that in due time.
Along with the pipeline changes, we see a whole host of new tweaks and adjustments. DirectX 11 is actually a strict superset of DirectX 10.1, meaning that all of those features are completely encapsulated in and unchanged by DirectX 11. This simple fact means that all DX11 hardware will include the changes required to be DX 10.1 compliant (which only AMD can claim at the moment). In addition to these tweaks, we also see these further extensions:
While changes in the pipeline allow developers to write programs to accomplish different types of tasks, these more subtle changes allow those programs to be more complex, higher quality, and/or higher performance. Beyond all this, Microsoft has also gone out of its way to help make parallel programming a little bit easier for game developers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
109 Comments
View All Comments
bobjones32 - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
Derek, Vista has been out for only 2 years. Take a look at XP's first two years and it was a phenomenal disaster comparatively. How people forget its far more significant performance and driver compatibility issues, and of course the Blaster worm, is totally beyond me.Just look at some of the nightmares: http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archi...">http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs...8/06/30/...
Business uptake? Initial consumer uptake? Driver support? Gaming speed? Security? Compatibility? Vista's first two years have been incredibly successful compared to XP's first two years.
The difference? In 2001, sensationalist blogging making mountains out of molehills and purporting endless false perceptions without significant evidence wasn't nearly as popular. Apple's ads that only fed into peoples' ignorance only helped that false perception grow.
Zoomer - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
Compare XP to 98SE.Now compare Vista to XP.
We have to take things in context.
CvP - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
TOTALLY AGREE.well said.
Goty - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
So the gist of this comment (Derek's) is that Vista doesn't suck, but you still say, "Vista sucks."I'm confused now.
Anyhow, I personally agree with the other people in the section that say Vista is a great operating system. I installed it in January of '07 and the only change I've made is to move from Business to Ultimate (thanks to the fact that I was using an ATI video card at the time and the fact that they didn't slack off on their driver development).
DerekWilson - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
Actually, that's an apt statement.Vista is currently something it was not initially. This made it "suck" in the hearts and minds of many people at the start, damaging the Windows brand and frustrating users. While, as I said, those issues are largely gone post SP1. This impacted Microsoft's ability to inspire confidence in the industry that everyone would eventually move to a platform that ran DX10, whether or not the OS eventually got to a stable place.
In spite of this, I use Vista: I have 6GB of RAM and I'm interested in DX10 for the sake of DX10 personally. I'm a bit of a technologist and I like things for the sake of the thing, really, but that doesn't mean that MS didn't drop the ball in their delivery of Vista.
just4U - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - link
What made it suck in the hearts and minds of many people was the refusal to move away from what they allready knew. Changing your operating system has always brought alot of grumbling from the majority... but it's even more overstated with XP which has been around and in wide use far longer then previous Microsoft Operating systems.The beta form of Vista I found to be buggy as hell.. But ofcourse I was testing it on a 1800+ Tbird with 1G of ram. Later when I adopted it (before sp1) it was fine with very few problems. I'd even go as far as saying way way less then what XP had at launch.
CvP - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
and XP was much better *when* it was released?!until XPsp1, it was a piece of shit.
until XPsp2, it wasn't worth switching to XPsp2.
and all those lack of driver etc..it was not MS's fault.
poohbear - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
"calling it like it is"? i have vista64 premium and i much prefer it to win XP. I have the hardware to run it flawlessly ofcourse, and in that context it's anything but "sucks". would never go back to XP, so please vista has come a looooooong way and doesnt need superfluos opinions like this in 2009.mechBgon - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
Derek, if you take a look at Valve's monthly user survey, the ratio of Vista to WinXP users is now at about 1 to 2.1 and climbing by the month. That's not what I'd call "rejection of Vista." I think you've been reading The Inq too much :)As for your remark about Vista being a "WinME," I disagree. WinXP was the WinME of this era; it was basically Win2000 with a few bonus features, like WinME was a makeover of Win98SE. Once WinXP SP2 was released, *then* WinXP actually had some real merit over Win2000 in the security department, but that was late in the game.
Vista, however, is a paradigm shift, a watershed in Windows history. Stuff is not run at Admin level by default anymore, and never will be again. Pulling that off without breaking 80% of the existing software in the world was an amazing accomplishment that involved virtualizing the Registry and file system (a little-known facet of UAC, as it happens).
This is another misguided factoid:
"MS recognized that they had a problem and implemented and extended again and again downgrade options to Windows XP for customers who were unsatisfied with Vista."
Well heck, OEM Windows XP Pro comes with downgrade rights to run Win98 or WinME. It's not a backpedalling measure, nor a confession that WinME is better than WinXP. That's normal Microsoft policy so customers can license the current OS but use the previous version, temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason.
There will be downgrade rights with the appropriate versions of Windows 7, too.
suryad - Thursday, February 5, 2009 - link
I am not so sure you can just take Valve's survey which is just predominantly consisting of gamers as a good statistic. Thats just my 2 cents. An OS is not just meant for gaming...sure thats a good amount of Vista users in the survey but what about the rest of the people who are not gamers? I am pretty confident that most people who are on Vista and are on the Steam survey are/were sold by the appeal of DX 10 and next generation gaming and graphics and all that.