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.
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Havor - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
DX10 is Vista only ware XP and 98SE/win2k shared a common DXAnd yeah XP was Win2K but it had better gaming support then W2K so there was no reason not to use XP over W2K, and only very old games gave some problems whit XP over 98SE.
Ware Vista almost had no RL benefits over XP just a high resource hog and steep learning curve.
If people could had a those between XP and vista i think Vista Nr's would have bin 75% lower
Other then DX10 and x64 there is no reason for me to go to Vista, so i will wait for Win7 and upgrade to i7/i5 till then my X2 6000+ and XP sp3 will do
michal1980 - Friday, January 30, 2009 - link
i agree with most of your logic. And it makes sense. It didn't feel right with the rest of the article though.I will however disagree with it being compared to Win ME.
Win ME was just junk, unstable, worthless, and never improving. And while vista had teething issues, alot of it was due to a huge shift in the actual OS.
I haven't tired 7 yet, but from all I read,it seems like vista re-tuned. However I doubt Win7 could have ever gotten to where it is without Vista. Vista was a trail by fire, and in most cases it made it. A huge problem early on was hardware specs to run it were set too low, and it was hell for people on cheap low end hardware.
My experance has been overall very postive, esspically when I moved to 4gb's of ram. Driver problems now are minimal (x64), and no matter how stable XP ever was. IMHO, and in my experance, vista has been leaps and bounds more stable. I can't recall having an OS crash/lock up that required a reboot. If not for hardware changes/updates, my vista box would never reboot.
Havor - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
The compering to ME holds up some bid, do vista is not as bad as ME was.How ever on my computer club there was a 100% return to 98SE ore win2k, most users(70%) here that run dual-boot Vista/XP machine, returned to XP after trying Vista for a wile (me included)
And there has never bin Any love for the OS especially compared to XP.
The bigger problem for dev. is that DX10 is Vista only, and there are way to many XP machines out there to develop DX10 only games, so from a dev. point of view Vista was/still is the next ME.
just4U - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - link
WinME is what Vista will eventually be compared to no matter what. I had less problems with WinME then I did with 98, or 95 but it got a bad rap.. Nowadays people just all say it was crap. Im sure 5-7+ years from now they will say the exact same thing about Vista. (shrug)marsbound2024 - Friday, January 30, 2009 - link
I agree with what you have said. Microsoft had years to develop Vista where previously its OS releases came within two years of each other. It should have been optimized at the very least and we have seen that it is resource-intensive and one might even say "bloated." While Vista does work and I rather like working with Vista 64-bit, I think it should have been more than what it is for having such a lengthy development timeframe. While many of us superbly informed on computer operating systems and application support, the average consumer seems to really dislike Vista. From UAC to horrible startup times on occasion (usually due to services such as Cyberlink), to the network connectivity problems that seem to be related to IPv6 and the fact that it used to bring budget systems to their knees (when they were manufactured with the purpose of running Vista), most people have a bad taste in their mouths from running Vista. Vista had a lot of promise on the table from what was on paper, but in execution it simply generated more headaches than it should have. Windows 7 should hopefully be getting back to what an operating system should be: streamlined GUI with robust, yet optimally programmed features that range from security to file management on NTFS.srp49ers - Friday, January 30, 2009 - link
The vista comments seemed out of place considering the tone of the rest of the article.Cuhulainn - Friday, January 30, 2009 - link
Agreed. Even if you think it sucks, give the reasons related to the article. I would like to know what issues there are between Vista/DirectX, as I am a current user. Rather than being told that what I am running sucks, tell me what is wrong with it, or what is right with 7 that is an improvement over Vista.That being said, I have little to no knowledge of these things and still found this to be an interesting read. Much appreciated.
Staples - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
And the fact that a year ago, most people who said that Vista sucks are ones who unsurprisingly never actually used it. When someone says Vista sucks, I always think there is a high probablility that they are someone who has never used it (and therefore stupid for saying something like that). Anyway, I have been using Vista since it came out and except for the fixes which made it use less resources, there never has been anything wrong with the OS despite what the legion of "I read it on the internet so it must be true" people would have you believe. Seems like the majority of geeks thought it sucked without having ever used it which is just idiotic. When I realized this, it was sad to know how gulible people really are.ssj4Gogeta - Friday, January 30, 2009 - link
It will be great if MS releases DX11 for XP. I multi-boot XP and Vista and Ubuntu. I think I'll replace Vista with Win 7 and not XP.By the way, why haven't we heard anything about Larrabee? Intel said that the first samples would be ready by the end of 2008. It seems to me like it will be a revolutionary step in graphics computing.
Ryan Smith - Friday, January 30, 2009 - link
It won't happen, it can't happen. DX10 goes hand-in-hand with a massive rearchitecting of GPU threading and memory management, which is why we transitioned from the XPDM to WDDM for Vista. You can't backport that kind of stuff, it's a fundamental change in how the OS addresses the GPU and allocates work & resources for it.