Posts tagged with DirectX 11
The ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series – something for everyone!
Posted by Simon Vivera in 5:23 PM
Loading ...My neighbor in the office, Dave Baumann, and I have been keeping busy over the last few months helping to bring you some very cool products that are just in time for the holidays. He helped launch the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 graphics series on September 23, and we launched the ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 graphics series just three weeks later. When he mentioned he was writing a blog about how the community helped inspire the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, I figured it was a great opportunity for me to write about some of the questions I get while talking to members of the community.
DirectX 11 & HD Gaming:
You may have already seen a lot on what to expect from DirectX 11, the top 11 reasons for DirectX 11, and so on. I often get asked “when will DirectX 11 titles begin shipping”. When I say “quicker than you’d expect…like now”, I get a lot of surprised looks. Having been through past DirectX transitions, I can’t remember another instance when game developers were this amped about working on a new DirectX version, with ‘AAA’ game titles lining up so quickly. One of the key reasons for the excitement from the developer community is because they feel DirectX 11 offers them some really cool features that can enable both improved game play performance and new levels of realism. Check out this YouTube video from DiRT 2 showing some of the features that Codemasters incorporated from DirectX 11, creating an incredibly realistic gaming experience:
On the titles front, I think the rapid development cycle has been aided by our seeding of ATI Radeon HD 5700 series graphics cards for several months prior to launching the product. As a result, game developers have had a chance to literally play around with the hardware and get a jump on coding awesome games that are scheduled for release in this year and throughout 2010!
Studios around the world have announced support for DirectX 11 – more than 20 titles are in development, with more to come. Here’s a small list of upcoming DirectX 11 titles, with the first two, BattleForge and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, available now:
- BattleForge (EA)
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (THQ)
- DiRT 2 (Codemasters)
- Aliens vs. Predator (Rebellion)
- Lord of the Rings: Online (Turbine)
- Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited (Turbine)
Speaking of the latest games, a friend of mine recently picked up a new HD monitor (1920x1200 resolution) as the price was right (under 
$200). He tried playing some of the latest games on his new display and quickly discovered that at HD resolutions, his old video card struggled with frame rates. The ATI Radeon HD 5770 is the perfect solution for situations just like this; it easily handles today’s game titles at HD resolutions and, with support for DirectX 11, it will be able to play soon-to-be released titles as well. The best part is that the price of this card is less than the price of many HD monitors. And if you got a really good deal on those HD monitors why not splurge and buy 3 
Then you could use ATI Eyefinity multi-monitor technology to get a truly immersive HD gaming experience. Imagine being able to see your enemies as they try to sneak up from beside you in first person shooters, or seeing the whole track while driving your car in DiRT 2.
Power Efficiency:
In addition to performance and image quality, gamers care more and more about power efficiency. For the performance that you’re getting, we’ve never before been able to offer power efficiency like this – the ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card consumes as little as 16 watts at idle, almost a quarter of the power consumed by a standard 60 watt light bulb! There are lots of reasons to be happy that the GPU is using less power, one of which is the money you save heating your case – it may not be a lot but every little bit helps!
For instance, have you ever been in the middle of a crazy fire fight in Call of Duty 4 when all of a sudden the GPU fan kicks into full gear, drowning out the sound of the bullets whizzing past your head? It really takes you out of the game quickly. Because the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series uses less power (only 108 watts when gaming) and it runs cool – there is less need for the distracting noise of a loud fan.
Because of its low power needs, the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series requires only a single 6 pin power connector. If you purchased a graphics card about 2 years ago, such as a card in the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series, you’ll already have a 6-pin power connector so this card can be a drop-in replacement. It’s the perfect card for those gamers looking to upgrade. No need to gut your system when you buy a new power supply!
Media Centers
Media centers or home theater PCs (HTPCs) have been talked about a lot in the past few years. With the amount of HD content that is available on the web in the form of downloadable or streaming content, it’s easy to see why their popularity is increasing. With the ATI Radeon HD 5700, you now have the perfect card for use in your Media Center. Its low power consumption make it an ideal candidate for a media center as it operates quietly, even during HD decoding, due to the 2nd generation unified video decoder (UVD2) processing engine. A really cool feature is the ability to pass through 8-channel (7.1) lossless high bit rate audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) that is found on Blu-Ray. In the past, this would have required an additional sound board, a cost of up to $200. With the ATI Radeon HD 5700, this feature is supported without the need for any additional hardware.
We hope that you have as much fun playing on the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series as we did in building it. We’d love to hear your comments!
Simon Vivera is the product manager for the ATI Radeon HD 5700 graphics series. 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.
ATI Catalyst™ 9.10 Driver – What’s New?
Posted by Jay Marsden in 8:32 AM
I would like to thank Ian McNaughton for doing such a FANTASTIC job at informing and building the following that he has on AMD at Play. Ian has handed the reins of the blog covering our ATI Catalyst software suite over to me as he is focusing on adding more diverse content to AMD at Play blogs. Ian will still be monitoring this blog and will be engaging with the community where he can.
A little about me: I have been working in the GPU industry for approx 16 years, with most of that time at ATI Technologies doing many different jobs, from working in a lab testing for Hardware Qualification on ATI GPUS, to Product Marketing for ATI’s motherboard chipsets, to my current role as Public Relations Manager for AMD supporting reviews of our ATI GPUs and ATI Catalyst drivers.
The ATI Catalyst driver blogs have been gaining momentum, and interest is growing each and every month. The ATI Catalyst team is dedicated to keeping users informed about any and all updates on our drivers.
Between Windows 7, DirectX 11, and the new ATI Radeon GPUs, we are taking your visual experience to the next level with DirectX 11 support and new features like ATI Eyefinity technology. ATI Catalyst drivers are at the center of this innovation, driving new features and functions, while focusing on compatibility, and stability for all.
It is the ultimate tool for your GPU!
I have made you wait long enough – on to the ATI Catalyst 9.10 driver release!
New Features:
- Official ATI Catalyst WHQL release supporting ATI Radeon HD 5800 series GPUs. ATI Catalyst 9.10 now includes full GPU support for the award winning ATI HD Radeon 5800 series GPUs!
- Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series. ATI Catalyst 9.10 provides support for a new Anti-Aliasing method on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series. Users can now experience the high level of anti-aliasing image quality using Super Sampling anti-aliasing while maintaining good performance levels.
Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.10 release for Linux includes:
- This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems: Ubuntu 9.10 early look support
Highlights of resolved issues
- Ghostbusters video game no longer flickers between desktop and game play when anti-aliasing is set to 8X and game resolution set to 2560×1600
- Enabling Screen Space Ambient Occlusion option in “Riddick 2 Dark Athena” no longer causes the game to fail under Multi-GPU configurations
- Severe flickering no longer observed while running 3D games/samples on specific HDMI displays with configurations using ATI CrossFireX™ technology in tri and quad modes
- Desktop flashing no longer observed after driver installation and reboot with systems configured with Radeon ASIC in the primary PCIe slot and ATI Fire Stream™ ASIC in the secondary PCIe slot
- “Combat Mission Shock Force” no longer fails after a duration of game play
- Underscan/Overscan settings for TV can now be applied from the ATI Catalyst Control Center – TV Properties Adjustments page
- Changes to the “All Settings” and “Basic Quality” pages in ATI Catalyst Control Center - Avivo™ Video will now be retained after reboot
To download the driver, click here.
Discuss Catalyst 9.10 in our Forums.
See you Next Month!
Jay Marsden
Jay Marsden is a Public Relations 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.
DirectX 11 – What to expect!
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 5:01 PM
(39 votes, average: 4.74 out of 5)Realism like never before
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Have you wondered what all the hype around Microsoft Windows 7 and DirectX 11 is all about? We will shed some light and answer some of those questions in this blog.
Let’s start with Windows7, everyone, including my own mother, is talking about this amazing operating system. Microsoft is rumoured to be launching the successor to Windows Vista in late October. What does it mean to you the PC user?
I cover my experience with Windows 7 in this blog; in a nutshell, the experience has been fantastic. It seems that Microsoft has worked out all the kinks and quirkiness of Windows Vista and are about to launch an incredible OS for the PC. Windows 7 (when compared to Windows Vista) is designed to offer the user a much more refined experience, smaller footprint, faster response times, long battery life and a much more visually intense and enjoyable PC experience.
Wrapped up in all the new Windows 7 OS splendour is a new API (Application programming Interface) called DirectX 11. Basically, the API allows developers to program software that uses a standard set of terms to communicate with the libraries and the OS. Think of it as game developers have some new toys to play with inside Windows to allow them to deliver better software.
DirectX has been around since 1995 with the launch of Windows95, a full history can be found here.
Let me break down the features and benefits of DirectX 11 -- the main features being:
-Tessellation -- Multithreaded Rendering - DirectCompute
Tessellation is a technology that has been around for a few GPU (graphics processing unit) generations. AMD has had Tessellation support since 2001, which was then called Truform; we also implemented Tessellation in the XBOX 360 GPU, then codenamed “Xenos”. Tessellation is a feature which increases the number of polygons in an image. Basically, Tessellation enables a more lifelike image, both of objects and landscape. Back in the day characters who were CG (computer generated) looked very blocky, almost cartoon like; with the use of Tessellation, developers are now able to significantly increase the number of triangles to draw an image, thus creating a more lifelike quality in games.
Multithreaded Rendering is a feature which allows DirectX to be processed via multiple CPU threads. This means that a dual-, triple- or quad-core CPU can have a higher utilization across all cores than DirectX APIs in the past. Historically the OS would load up a single core for commands to the GPU, in essence creating an overload on the first core and under utilizing the additional cores. With only one core issuing commands to a GPU, we have seen CPUs hold back the potential performance of the GPU. With Multithreaded Rendering, DirectX will take better advantage of all the available cores. This should result in a better experience for the multi-core user because of a faster processing pipeline and increased scaling.
DirectCompute is a feature which allows access to the shader cores/pipeline for Stream Computing (graphics acceleration) type applications and physics acceleration. One of the biggest technology breakthroughs of the past 5 years has been the notion that processing can be moved from the traditional CPU to the much more parallel GPU. Simply put, the CPU manages tasks sequentially; it accomplishes a task then moves on to the next task in a very orderly fashion and with tremendous speed. Today’s CPUs can work at speeds of up to 108.8 GigaFLOPS (Floatingpoint Operations Per Second).
A GPU is designed to work with many slower cores in parallel, giving a much wider vector -meaning a wider road for more cars to travel on -- than a CPU. This allows tasks to be completed faster if the program or software is developed to take advantage of many-many cores, albeit slower ones. Today’s GPUs can work at speeds up to 1.36 TeraFLOPS, giving the GPU a significant (almost 11 times faster) advantage when the proper software is run. This advantage truly delivers on the processing capabilities of Stream Computing. DirectCompute allows easier access to the GPU’s many cores for parallel processing; if the user is running applications that take advantage of Stream Computing then the performance experience increases considerably. We are seeing transcoding as the first type of task that is seeing tremendous benefit using Stream Computing. This means if you are an avid HD video or music user you will benefit when converting files to play on your laptop or iPod type devise; Stream Computing can significantly cut down the wait-time for enjoying your converted media.
Now, if you are a gamer you undoubtedly will be asking me “What games are going to support DirectX 11″? This is always a tightrope to walk for us as we are unable to pre-announce our technology partners titles and the specs around those titles; still, we want to give the consumer confidence that we’ve been assured there will be substantial titles in the market that take full advantage of your ATI Radeon DirectX 11-compliant graphics card. So, as this blog is published, here are the future DirectX 11 games we can talk about:
Dirt2 by Codemasters
BattleForge by EA
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat by GSC Game World
- Check out this early spoiler for Dirt 2 -
Some industry folks have stated that we will see more titles that support DirectX 11 then we did for DirectX 10. Some even say that DirectX 11 is the full implementation of what DX10 should and could have been, but that is subjective opinion and conjecture.
Game developers discuss the benefits of DirectX11
Windows7 and DirectX11 are right around the corner, as is the newest ATI Radeon family of graphics cards. As always, it’s our goal to blur the lines between reality and what is rendered. I believe we have made a major leap towards crossing that chasm with our ATI RadeonTM HD 5000 series products and their support for DirectX 11.
Tessellation - Minimized
With Tessellation - Maximized!
Between now and the launch of Windows 7 and DirectX 11, we will continue to uncover the technical details, as well as the visual implications, for the user experience.
At the time of this blog, AMD will be the first GPU vendor to market with a fully compliant and enabled DirectX 11 graphics product. So don’t be fooled by claims in the market about DX10 GPU’s supporting DirectX 11….
My good friend Tim Smalley from bit-tech.net has a great in-depth article on DirectX 11: A look at what’s coming – Check it out.
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing 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.
Windows 7 – The birth of a great OS
Posted by Ian McNaughton in 11:14 AM
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Did you skip Windows Vista waiting for Windows 7 with bated breath?
Let’s call out the “white elephant” in the room: Gamers have resisted Windows Vista in favour of Windows XP. I have to admit, I was one of those gamers, just didn’t see the benefit vs. cost to upgrade my OS, especially given my usage model which was mainly gaming at the time.
Fast forward a year or two and it’s a totally different story, I still game, but I also am doing a lot more video consumption and creation (albeit creating n00b videos of my kids). It also helps that I have had early access to Windows 7 prior to the RC being publically available. This has completely changed my view and opinion on when (not if) a user should embrace and get excited about the upcoming release of Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 7.
So, I expect the flames in the comments, and I am happy to have the debate. Maybe I am a lone voice in the world, perhaps I am drinking the kool-aid. I had a discussion the other day with a friend of mine, a hardcore gamer and content consuming machine, a true AMD enthusiast. This guy lives, eats and breathes AMD, and during this discussion he basically called me out as being a n00b for running Windows 7 on my main home PC and work laptop, he actually laughed. This made me start to question the experience I thought I was having, which by the way has been awesome, flawless and very favourable in terms of recommending to others to adopt. I questioned myself until I came across a Facebook post from another friend who is a true enthusiast – former AMD’er, now with the world’s largest PC OEM – a working dad, video editing guy and casual gamer, he summed up his experience with Windows 7 nicely, I thought I would share it with you:
So the debate will rage on, sides will be taken, lines will be drawn, artillery will be engaged and the battle will ensue. It’s funny how something as simple as an OS evokes such emotion in the PC enthusiast. MAC users will gush over the superiority of the “chosen ones” MAC OS X Snow Leopard, PC users will throw daggers at Redmond in hopes they will listen, the penguin community will continue to garner more and more OEM wins and mainstream adoption, but at the end of the day we have one major OS option and this time around, it’s a really good option!
Would like to hear from the community, how has your Windows 7 experience been so far? Please post in comments.
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing 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.
Why we should get excited about DirectX 11
Posted by Richard Huddy in 7:33 PM
As an admitted gaming technology geek, it’s hard not to get excited about the advancements in game technology. As many of you know, DirectX 11 is just around the corner, offering a dazzling array of new toys for game developers and people like me to play with. But as excited as the developer in me is about DirectX 11, I’m even more excited as a gamer, and you should be too. That’s because DirectX 11, in combination with new graphics hardware, and in some cases Windows 7, brings significant changes to the computing experience, changes that mean upcoming games and other applications are about to get a lot better. Let me explain how.
Microsoft, and those of us in the graphics business, have been openly talking about DirectX 11 for around a year now – in fact, to be honest we’ve been talking about it since even before Windows Vista shipped at the very end of 2006! It takes a long time to put together a new version of DirectX and there are often tough decisions about what to leave out while finalizing any one version. So we often agree that the parts which are being left out in the ‘current’ version will find their way into the next version.
So let’s take a good look at what’s in DirectX 11. I’m not going to go into painful technical detail; instead, I will try to look at the consequences of those technical details. One important note, unlike DirectX 10, DirectX 11 isn’t tied to Windows 7, so those of you sporting a Windows Vista system will get to reap the rewards as well.
There are three main areas of impact in DirectX 11:
1. A beast called the tessellator has been added which enables games developers to create smoother, less blocky and more organic looking objects in games. This is the change you’ll probably be most aware of. And it’ll show up when you look at the silhouettes of hills and mountains or the profiles of characters in games. Where artists previously had to trade off quality for performance, now artists will have the freedom to create naturalistic scenery. We’ve gotten used to seeing strangely blocky ears and noses on our opponents. But the new generation of games should allow those opponents to scare the heck out of us instead. The tessellator represents a natural next step in gaming hardware (in fact the Xbox 360 graphics chip that AMD designed already has a tessellator, and AMD graphics hardware has featured tessellator technology starting with the ATI RadeonTM HD 2000 series right up to the latest ATI RadeonTM HD 4000 series cards today).
[An example of tessellation giving characters more definition.]
2. Games programmers will also be given a radically new way to program for AMD graphics chips. The second new beast in the menagerie is the excitingly named “Compute Shader”. It allows games programmers to treat the GPU in a much less graphics-oriented way; indeed, they can almost treat it like a highly parallel CPU. [The buzzword for this is "GPGPU" , see http://blogs.amd.com/play/2008/11/05/the-gpgpu-chronicles/ for details.]
Up until DirectX 10.1 a graphics programmer always had to think in terms of triangles – but the compute shader changes that and allows the programmer a much freer expression of their thoughts. If you try to solve a problem of artificial intelligence or physics, you probably don’t think the problem through in terms of triangles. So the compute shader is a more natural way for the programmer to approach his or her task. On top of that it allows access to some of the features that would otherwise have been hidden away inside our present and future chips and for that reason it will often allow significantly more efficient implementations than heretofore (that means “higher frame rates” to you and me ).
3. DirectX has been sliced and diced and the internals redesigned to ensure that it is much more efficient at using the horsepower present in multiple CPU cores. This will be a huge win on chips like our AMD PhenomTM II quad and triple core processors [http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_15331_15332,00.html] and it will provide the opportunity for both higher frame rates and games which are more realistic, because they contain dramatically more detail.
There are numerous other, less important changes aimed to make the games programmer’s tasks easier. Some so small that you’d have to be a games programmer to care, some (like improved texture compression) are big enough to help out significantly with performance in corner cases.
Quite often you get to hear rather bland but optimistic statements about the future versions of DirectX. “It’ll be faster and better” – but you don’t get to hear much in the way of substantial justification.
This time around I hope it’s abundantly clear – I predict that:
- We’ll see higher frame rates because the way DirectX 11 uses CPUs will be more efficient.
- We’ll see higher frame rates because games developers will be able to use our GPUs more like CPUs.
- We’ll see smoother, more realistic characters and more realistic terrain as we move away from blocky polygonal representations to the kind that are used in movies.
- And a side-benefit, that will help PC gaming generally, is that the new version is easier to use, so it will help to keep game development costs down.
On top of that there’s something worth mentioning here about the evolution of computer graphics. Every generation of DirectX has been designed to be an improvement upon the previous generation. We always make a point of including all the old functionality (so that you can run any of your existing games). This time is no exception; the nearest thing to DirectX11 is DirectX10.1. And it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I can’t resist mentioning that this means that owners of ATI RadeonTM HD 4000 series graphics have a distinct advantage, since AMD is the only major supplier of graphics chips that supports DirectX 10.1 http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd4800/index.html . DirectX 10.1 is the closest you can get to DirectX 11 until Windows 7 ships.
When it does ship though, get ready for a significantly improved gaming experience thanks to the combination of DirectX 11 features enabled by phenomenal new DirectX 11 hardware from AMD.
Richard Huddy is Sr. Manager Developer Relations 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.