With the recent release of DirectX® 11 technology, one of the most frequently asked questions is what changes will DirectX 11 bring to gaming. Will it help to satisfy the gnawing hunger for the really immersive experience? The question is justified, because DirecxtX 10 did change a lot in terms of API, which helped make developers’ lives easier. Alas, the end users with their wishes ended up at a loose end. But now the situation is different: in the quest to enhance the visual quality, DirectX 11 is simply a treasure trove.

Want the proof? Unigine Corp. has brought the convincing answer to this question with the first DirectX 11 benchmark in the world, called Heaven, based on the Unigine real-time 3D game engine. The benchmark can be downloaded from the official website free of charge.

“Heaven” comes up with the world of floating islands topped with tiny villages and cobblestone streets. The peaceful scenery of wind-blown fields and smoking chimneys is unfolded as you fly or walk through. But aside from lyrics, a picture paints a thousand words: take a closer look at the dragon statue spikes to realize the supremacy of hardware tessellation.

Meanwhile, let’s discover the nuts and bolts of the new DirectX 11 technology.

The key to making the magic happen is hardware tessellation. Forget about the number of polygons: this technology comes so close to the scope of human vision, you can hardly understand that the image isn’t live footage. It’s not an old bump mapping technologies like normal mapping or parallax mapping that fake the tridimensionality; it’s the geometry itself that becomes more detailed. With tessellation, the polygons are subdivided into smaller and finer pieces without a drastic performance penalty. Moreover, the content becomes conveniently scalable due to adaptive tessellation that takes into the account distance to the camera. Besides, the advanced geometry naturally casts shadows that are much more realistic to the eye.

Tessellation technology is not a revelation of the day.  Actually, it was there years before. But now it is officially added into the DirectX 11 API, allowing developing and introducing to the market brave new titles that just make the grade of detalization.

But wait, there is more: DirectCompute! The GPU alligator has acquired another set of teeth to crunch large amounts of data and calculations while taking full advantage of the parallel processing power. The Unigine engine uses DirectCompute to help speed up some post-processing effects such as high dynamic range, screen space ambient occlusion and glow effects. That means faster physics simulation, cinematic special effects and more life-like water representation can be implemented here and now, using the current generation of video cards.

“I’m glad to see that AMD takes leadership in real-time 3D hardware. No need to say, our team is happy to work with this company because of their responsive developers and constantly improving technologies. However, I hope there will be more DX11 solutions available on the market soon, since it’s a real breakthrough to the next level of 3D graphics. In our turn, we already have a robust cutting-edge technology platform to offer, which developers can use to break a new virtual reality ground.”
Denis Shergin, CEO of Unigine Corp.

The bottom line? Enough procrastination – simply download the “Heaven” benchmark and taste for yourself what the future of gaming is.

Unigine is a cross-platform 3D-engine by Unigine Corp. designed to help developers create visually stunning and complex interactive virtual worlds. It is currently being used by game developers to create first-person shooter, RPG, racing and MMO games. It is also being used for non-gaming projects such as a 3D animated movie, a historical reconstruction and interactive simulators.  For more information on Unigine, you can visit their site at http://unigine.com/

Beijing Kylin Network Information Technology Co. Ltd (Kylin) is one of the top computer and internet games companies in China. The Kylin team is working on its DirectX 11 technology-based gaming engine, which will drive  future MMORPG titles, such as Kylin’s flagship title, “Genghis Khan.”

The Kylin team has adopted DirectX 11 to help them deliver the most realistic online gaming experience possible. Tessellation is one area that Kylin has put in a great deal of effort. Tessellation is a technique in DirectX 11 that allows the developers to create and send lower polygon characters and scenes to the graphics processor, which does the job of adding more polygons where details are wanted without negatively impacting performance.

They are using tessellation to add extra details to characters’ weapons, armor and, clothing. The tessellation makes the characters more visually appealing, and allows for more realistic shadows, since there is more geometric information available. The tessellation is also dynamic, so it can be controlled by the distance of the camera, so the details can be added and rendered when the camera is up close and you can see the details.  It can also be turned off when the camera is far away and the details wouldn’t be seen.

The Kylin team is also using Shader Model 5.0 to implement contact hardening shadow mapping so the characters can cast softer shadows.

“We have relied on DirectX 11 to help us create beautifully detailed scenes and characters for our game engine,” said Pengxiang Zeng, CTO and Vice President, Beijing Kylin Network Information. “With DirectX 11 we have been able to create a look that would have been too complex and too slow under previous DirectX implementations.”

The Kylin team is also using DirectX 11’s Direct Compute to add post processing effects like light blooming and depth of field. All of the effects being implemented work together to create a beautiful, immersive gaming environment.

For more information on Kylin please visit 70yx.com

We wanted to get a game developer’s thoughts on DirectX 11, the impact it will have on gaming, and the problems it can solve for game developers. We asked Kevin Strange, AMD Developer Relations Account Manager in the UK to interview Johan Andersson, Senior Software Architect in the Frostbite Engine team at DICE. Here are excerpts from that interview.  For the full interview please download it here.

(1) Can you start please with some background on how you are using DirectX 11 in the Frostbite 2 engine? What made you decide to jump onboard with DirectX 11?

We’ve been part of the DirectX 11 development from a _very_ early stage, a few years before there was an internal prototype available even. This helped us make sure that many of the features & improvements that are important for us got in — so that we have what we need to make the best possible PC games in the future.

There are 2 different areas where we are using DirectX 11 in Frostbite 2. The first is to streamline and optimize the CPU performance; how our engine & games communicate with D3D to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. This has become a bigger and bigger problem with previous D3D versions as GPU performance has been scaling and the CPUs have gotten more cores, but without us being able to utilize them for rendering with D3D.

Now in DirectX 11, with the new support for multi-threading in the API, we can render objects and submit it to the GPU in parallel on all available CPU cores (we’ve tested up to 16 virtual cores). This will be a big performance improvement and allow us to have much more variation and detail on our levels while costing less than before.

The multi-threading support also enables us to get faster loading times by loading shaders and other resources in parallel and to efficiently stream in textures & meshes without stalls, which would otherwise result in unwanted jerky performance in the game.

The second area of DirectX 11 that we are using includes some of the new hardware features such as compute shaders. We use compute shaders for deferred shading, which enables us to have many more all-dynamic light sources than we’ve been able to have before. We also see a big potential for using compute shaders for other future effects and optimization techniques.

(2) Can you share any details of how you plan to use DirectCompute 11 to implement deferred shading? What does that mean in terms of how your games would look or perform?  Can you think of other way you might use DirectCompute 11?

Our plan is to improve performance and at the same time be able to have many more dynamic light sources than we’ve been able to have previously — and by a wide margin even. This is possible as the culling & processing of large light sources can be done much more efficiently and directly in a compute shader compared to traditional deferred rendering techniques.

I did a talk at the Siggraph’09 “Beyond Programmable Shading” course that described this technique a bit more in depth, the slides for the talk are available here: http://repi.blogspot.com/2009/08/siggraph09-parallel-graphics-in.html

At Siggraph we also showed a demo of a scene in Frostbite 2 with 1000 large overlapping dynamic light sources flying around which ran on an ATI Radeon HD 5850 card with very good performance.

There are many other interesting uses for compute shaders, for example many post-processing effects are a very good fit such as fast screen-space ambient occlusion, doing large blur kernels and accurate depth of field.

(3) The other big new hardware feature of DirectX 11 is the tessellator. Can you tell us about your plans for that and is it really a big deal?

Tessellation is a new big piece of technology in DirectX 11 and something that we are excited about. Tessellation combined with displacement mapping is a very powerful tool that can dramatically increase the detail of our objects and still render them very efficiently by varying the level of detail dynamically.

The primary areas that we are looking into using tessellation in the future are:

• Smooth / round objects (for example vehicles and their wheels)
• Very bumpy objects such as cobblestones and rocky terrain
• Characters

One difficulty however with tessellation and esp. displacement mapping is that it requires changes to the whole content authoring pipeline step and how our artists build objects. So it isn’t as easy to use as some of the other DX11 features, but definitely one of the more powerful features going forward.

(4) Take up of DirectX 10 in games was pretty slow – do you think the same might be true this time around with DirectX 11?  [Please give your reasons for your answer.]

Yes I agree that the transition to DirectX 10 was slow. One of the main reasons for this, in my view, was that it was tied into Windows Vista which unfortunately had lower adoption than one would have hoped for (from our perspective).

This tie in was, however, necessary for technical reasons, as DirectX 10 got a much needed clean slate implementation and a new driver model which was required to continue on.

Now with DirectX 11 and Windows 7 we have a very different, and much better, situation for 3 reasons:

• DirectX 11 isn’t limited to Windows 7, it will also work on Windows Vista so everyone that is already using Vista will be able to use it. This is a huge benefit for everyone involved.

• Windows 7 is an excellent OS for gamers (but please use the 64-bit version!) and I predict a vast amount of the gamers that are still on Windows XP, which is now a 8 year old operating system, will upgrade to Windows 7 and as such go directly from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11 awesomeness.

• Thirdly, many game developers have also been “stuck” on DirectX 9 and Windows XP as this have been the primary and very large user base that they have been developing for. This created a Catch-22 situation as many gamers didn’t see the benefit of upgrading to Windows Vista & DirectX 10 as there were few games that supported it fully.

Now with Windows 7 and DirectX 11, it feels like there are a lot of developers that are planning to make the jump directly from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, which will help solve this Catch-22 situation and provide gamers with another great reason to upgrade.

(5) Can you confirm that the new techniques that you develop using DirectX 11 now on AMD hardware will be used in multiple future titles?

We have over a long time, since the absolute first early internal versions of DirectX 11, been working with it and building in support into the Frostbite 2 engine to fully utilize it.

And yes, these techniques and support will be used for multiple game titles as our technology foundation here at DICE going forward.

(6) What is OIT, why is “OIT” a big deal for you guys, and does DirectX 11 give you a solution to the problem?

OIT (“order-independent transparency”) is a solution to an age old problem in real-time graphics: How to render transparent surfaces and have them be correctly sorted against each other to look right. This is a very difficult problem to solve efficiently, and it has limited the way we create content in games where we have to be very restrictive of how we use transparent surfaces and how they interact with each other.

Now with DirectX 11 it has finally become possible to implement correct order-independent rendering of transparent surfaces (OIT). By taking advantage of that, pixel shaders can do atomic operations and scattered writes out into memory to collect multiple “layers” of the transparent surfaces. These layers are then sorted and correctly blended together using a compute shader.

We are interested in the possibilities that this opens up for us, where our artists can create content in totally new ways that was next to impossible before. For example having glass objects scattered around and inside glass buildings or having particle effects in-between windows of vehicles & buildings without getting sorting issues or rendering artifacts.

Although, as many of our games are competitive online games, we also must be very careful here as it wouldn’t be fair if a person with a DX11 card gets to see through glass buildings while someone with a DX10 card cannot. That would not be lead to good balanced game play.

(7) The ATI Radeon HD 5870 is the world’s most powerful GPU that you can buy today – and it has almost 3 Teraflops of compute power.  That’s great for Hi-Definition gaming…  But how much do you think you need for eye-definition gaming, and when do you think the good folks at AMD will finally be able to satisfy your demands for more horsepower or does this go on forever?

Give me 2-3x the computer power and 2 GB video memory (for frame buffers & textures) and we’ll deliver the eye-definition resolutions for our future high-end full DX11 games in highest possible level of detail. Fortunately, I’m optimistic that AMD will get there quite soon!

We want this development of ever more powerful GPUs to continue for a _long_ time forward. There are simply too many interesting techniques and opportunities both within real-time graphics and general compute for games going forward. Techniques that require enormous amounts of horsepower to be able to implement or improve upon to create the life-like interactive environments we and the gamers want in our games.

If this development continues on for next to forever (or say the next 20-30 years), until we reach a “Star Trek holodeck” / “The Matrix” level of interactivity and visuals – then that’s more than fine with me!

(but let’s skip the evil AI, ok?)

(10) AMD seems to have taken the world by surprise with the early release of DirectX 11 hardware. What has been your experience of the HD 5870 so far?

The HD 5870 is a very impressive graphics card, both in pure raw performance and with the support for all the new DirectX 11 functionality. The drivers are very robust and the few issues we’ve had have been fixed quickly.

One big benefit for us specifically with this card is that it is a very fast single-GPU card which is great as our editor ‘FrostEd’ runs in windowed mode where multi-GPU solutions aren’t ideal. Our artists and level designers need to run FrostEd with the full DirectX 11 rendering active to see exactly how the games look while building it.

Read the full interview

I was sitting at home the other day playing BattleForge on my computer and I heard a sound like a huge rat trap snapping shut coming from the direction of my wife’s desk. It just about made me jump out of my chair. When she got home and tried to boot up the system it didn’t POST so I took it out from under the desk and opened it up. I looked all over the motherboard for any blown chips or capacitors and removed the video card and hard drives to see if it’d beep with everything removed. Sure ’nuff, got a POST beep. I threw the card back in and nothing.

Since this motherboard didn’t have integrated graphics I went over to my box and put the card in it. No POST. I finally did what I should have done all along and took a good look at the card: five blown capacitors. Problem diagnosed, root cause found. So what now?

Graphics Card With Five Blown Capacitors

The next step is to pick out a video card to replace this one with. We have to get another card that can handle at least DirectX 9 games since we play RTSes together. Her flat panel has a max resolution of 1280×1024 so I don’t  need a beast of a card. Also, she’s not exactly going to be playing FPSes or anything really taxing on the graphics card. The power supply in that system only has one PCI-E 2×3 connector so the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 is definitely out and I don’t want to use a lot of power since that’s a system that’s running pretty much all the time and my wife uses it for work. And last but not least, I’m not exactly made of money (is now a bad time to ask for a raise?) so I’m shopping price.

With all those parameters I’m thinking of something in the ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 series. The ATI Radeon™ HD 4670 doesn’t require any PCI-E connections and has a power usage rating of 59W (which is only 9 watts more than the previous card that was in that box.) It’s a DirectX® 10.1-capable card and can easily handle gaming at 1280×1024. It doesn’t hurt that if you shop around you can find it from about $65 bucks US so my stingy side is placated. Sure, I’m missing out on taking advantage of the latest DirectX 11 graphics and ATI Eyefinity technology, but frankly, if I had the cash to spare for extra monitors I’d buy them for me. If the “boss” would approve. Actually, she’d probably make me buy diapers or kid’s clothes with it.

Andy Glover is a web project manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Turbine Inc. is a US-based game developer that has played a pioneering role in the 3D massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) space. Their roster of successful titles includes Asheron’s Call®, Dungeons and Dragons Online® and The Lord of the Rings Online™.

“DirectX 11 is advantageous to Turbine in a number of ways,” said Nate Jones, Vice President of Corporate and Business Development, Turbine. “Our titles are designed to enable cutting edge performance.  By supporting DirectX11, both The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online will deliver the most immersive and compelling experience for our players.”

In their upcoming games they will be using High Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO), a DirectX 11 feature that detects areas in scenes that should remain in deep shadow, and darkens them according to their depth.  HDAO uses DirectCompute to take advantage of the massively parallel processing power of DirectX 11 hardware.

They will also be using DirectCompute, DirectX 11’s compute shaders, to implement reactive water simulation which will calculate how water in the game should interact with game elements, such as characters, to make it look more realistic.

“Turbine was one of the first publishers to support DirectX 10 and we’re excited to repeat that support with DirectX 11,” said Jones. “Turbine will support DirectX 11 in both Windows Vista and Windows 7, which will give it a huge install base, which is critical for the success of MMORPGs like ours.”

For more information on Turbine, The Lord of the Rings Online or Dungeon & Dragons Online, please visit www.turbine.com.

Building a video game can take many forms. In some cases, games are built from scratch using in-house tools. In many cases, developers use a game engine to provide a re-usable framework for developing a computer game.

The game engine acts as the functional and technical infrastructure that a game or series of games is built on, leaving the game developers free to focus on gameplay, characters, and the overall look and storyline of the game. It is designed to simplify the highly complex game development workflow, and to save developers time and money throughout the development process.

Trinigy is one of the industry leaders in game engine development. Their Vision Engine (not to be confused with Vision Technology from AMD) is currently in use in more than 100 commercial game productions by well-known companies such as Ubisoft, Take 2, Dreamcatcher, Neowiz, Spellbound, Robot Entertainment, Nitro Games and more.

With their newly announced Vision Engine 7.6, Trinigy will be one of the first middleware providers to have built-in support for Microsoft DirectX® 11 (in addition to the engines’ ongoing support for Microsoft DirectX® 9 and Microsoft DirectX® 10). That support will enable game developers and artists to create more lifelike characters and environments in games.

“Trinigy remains committed to supporting the game development industry with top-notch game engine technology that combines efficiency, creative freedom and performance,” said Dag Frommhold, managing director at Trinigy. “We’re extremely excited to be working with AMD to support their DirectX® 11-compliant graphics processors. AMD’s quality drivers and hardware complement our commitment to game developers perfectly by empowering them to produce higher-level in-game graphics than ever before.”

In its latest Vision Engine, Trinigy has adopted contact-hardening shadows inside the new deferred rendering system, which will generate dynamic photorealistic soft shadows at superior frame rates. Trinigy plans to further expand its DirectX® 11 support by features such as Tessellation and Compute Shaders in their engine to enable developers to deliver smoother, less blocky and more organic-looking game graphics at higher frame rates, and with greater power efficiencies.

By incorporating DirectX® 11 into their game engine, Trinigy will help game developers get their games to market faster, and with the most advanced graphics features currently possible. For more information about the Vision Engine, visit Trinigy’s website here: http://www.trinigy.net.

BattleForge is a next-generation real-time strategy game, where you and your friends team up to fight epic battles against evil. BattleForge initially launched with DirectX® 10.1 support and EA Phenomic has just announced that it has adopted DirectX® 11 support and it is available to consumers now in their latest update, making them the first DirectX® 11 game ever.

“The largest advantage we’ve seen on Battle Forge in DirectX® 11 is overall performance where we’ve seen significant gains,” said Kevin O’Leary, Product Manager, EA Phenomic.

One of the challenges in creating realism in games is the handling of light. In real life a particular scene may have a number of light sources that can directly illuminate the parts of the room such as the sun shining through an open window, an overhead light, a desk lamp, or a television screen. Light also bounces off of objects in the room indirectly illuminating areas that aren’t directly illuminated. But even with multiple light sources, there are still parts of room or scene that are in shadow.

When you are creating a scene digitally, the more natural the lighting and shadows, the more realistic the scene can seem to a gamer. The team at EA Phenomic has opted to incorporate High Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO), a DirectX® 11 feature that detects “valleys” in scene geometry and darkens them according to their depth.  HDAO uses DirectCompute to take advantage of the massively parallel processing power of DirectX® 11 hardware.

“DirectX® 11 brings compute shading into the 3D API so we have better and easier access to the graphics hardware power,” said Dirk Ringe, General Manager, EA Phenomic. “We’re adding post processing effects, shadow map filtering and ambient occlusion using compute shaders.”

For more information on BattleForge you can visit their site here http://www.battleforge.com/portal/site/BattleForge/landingpage.

DriverHeaven have posted a new article examining the performance of DirectX 10 vs DirectX 11 on ATI Radeon HD 5800 and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series graphics.

Today we take a look at performance and image quality differences between DirectX 10.0 /10.1 and DirectX 11 when running Windows 7 on ATI’s latest hardware. The article also includes the world’s first detailed look at S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat running in DirectX 11 mode.

Read the entire article here

Dell recently announced some awesome new gaming PCs featuring ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series graphics. Dell’s own John B blogged about how ATI Eyefinity technology gets these astounding systems to live up to the pre-launch hype.

Before the unveiling of the new Alienware Aurora and Aurora ALX systems at the Tokyo Game Show, we were told that the upcoming announcements would shake the very foundation of PC gaming. Did the announcements live up to the hype? Folks at Engadget, Joystiq and Crunchgear seem to think the new Alienware systems are as bada$$ as they come, certainly live up to the hype, and I’m here to tell you why.

My reasons rest on one particular piece of hardware only available on the two new Alienware desktop systems: the ATI 5870 graphics card. The card is getting all kinds of praise from sites like Tom’s hardware for good reason. The new Alienwares’ bada$$itude centers upon this piece of hardware. Besides offering some of the best gaming performance ever, the card brings awesome technology forward with EyeFinity and DirectX 11.

EyeFinity is absolutely an astounding advancement. This technology allows a single GPU to support six independent displays simultaneously, and supports them in a variety of different physical configurations.
These configurations and others can be supported with the new Alienware desktop systems, and all of them require just a single graphics card. If that doesn’t knock your socks off, I really don’t know what will. For a good overview of what it’s all about, I recommend this article at Anandtech.

Check out the video blog from Sapphire Technology featuring Bill Donnelly speaking about the new Sapphire HD 5870 graphics card and DirectX 11 technology.