Real Life DirectX 10 Performance

AnandTech has a look at the performance PC gamers can expect see under Windows Vista with DirectX 10. Unfortunately, it isn't pretty. Despite the power of the new 10-compliant graphics cards, the choices made in developing this technology have resulted in a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable from commercial PC hardware. What's worse, the article starts off by pointing out that much of the shiny effects exclusive to DX10 games would have been possible with DX9, had Microsoft been inclined to develop in that direction. From the article: "[Current] cards are just not powerful enough to enable widespread use of any features that reach beyond the capability of DirectX 9. Even our high-end hardware struggled to keep up in some cases, and the highest resolution we tested was 2.3 megapixels. Pushing the resolution up to 4 MP (with 30" display resolutions of 2560x1600) brings all of our cards to their knees. In short, we really need to see faster hardware before developers can start doing more impressive things with DirectX 10."

Poor PC gamers...

I feel so sorry that they can't run the latest games at 2560x1600.

That means ...

... that people who bought DX10 cards so that in the future they will be able to play DX10 games when they come out have basically been sold a "Pig in a Poke". As its currently constituted DX-10 pretty much only serves as a device to obsolete Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista.

Re:That means ...

Exactly.

DX10 doesnt have "performance". DX10 is an API. You can benchmark API quality by a great many things, but performance is fairly irrelevant when that performance is tied so much to the undelying hardware.

DX10 is a good API if in a couple of years time, the shader models match the industry direction and there isnt a whole bunch of GL_EXT_OBS_ASS_HATTERY_BUF_GAY_PRIMITIVE extensions to make things work. This is likely considering the industry partnership arrangements MS have.

Anandtech can enjoy their cry that their hardware wasnt good enough to make the most of DX10. This is really a good thing for the API, it means that DX10 has some lifetime. A scarier headline would have been "Current Gen Cards Can Max Out What DX10 Is Capable Of". That would be the death of an API...

Re:That means ...

DX10 doesnt have "performance". DX10 is an API.

DX10 is an API with a built-in performance penalty. The way it is designed has all sorts of restrictions and limitations on how things are done. Why? In order to make it "DRM enhanced". Whether you are using DRM content or not, the video system is required to operate under DRM rules. It prohibits things like direct memory access, just in case you happen to have DRM video somewhere and you tried to do a video capture. It also imposes a variety overhead costs, like validating memory accesses to prevent you from reading or writing anyplace that could impact DRM security. It cripples functions or continuously re-validates function calls to ensure that they cannot be called in any manner that might be a threat to the DRM system.

You can benchmark API quality by a great many things, but performance is fairly irrelevant when that performance is tied so much to the undelying hardware.

Normally correct, but in this case the API deliberately hamstrings the hardware.

DX10 is a good API if in a couple of years time

Yes, faster hardware will speed things up. However that faster speed will still be slower than it would have been without DX10.

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Never upgrade too early

If the HL2 / Doom3 generation of games taught us anything. Don't believe the hype. Don't upgrade your computer for a game you don't have yet. By the time there's something interesting that requires you to upgrade, it will cost less to do so, and probably perform better.

Re:Never upgrade too early

Don't knock it. There's always someone who's willing to be the early adopter to no advantage. That guy, and others like him, make things affordable for the rest of us. The early adopter is usually happy with the situation and so should we be.

2560x1600 is real life?

Some interesting points in the article, but I'm unsure at how running tests that are hyper bandwidth-bottlenecked is any indication of the performance of DX10 features.

"OMG I can't push 30498230894384023984 pixels/sec through my DX10 card, DX10 sucks."

Shadowrun

Shadowrun is a nice example. It can be played on Windows XP with a hack.

According to Microsoft, its simply not possible as the XP version is still under development. It comes as no big surprise that DX9 can do 90% of what DX10 can do, especially since DX10 is Vista-only. Its just another attempt to push an operating system that very few people want. I'm sure I'll end up with a copy of it in a few years, but very few people actually want it right now.

No developer outside of Microsoft in their right mind would make a Vista-only game right now. It would be like releasing some Virutal Boy games.

Re:Shadowrun

Shadowrun is not DX10. It's just restricted to only run on Vista.

Re:Shadowrun

No developer outside of Microsoft in their right mind would make a Vista-only game right now. It would be like releasing some PlayStation 3 games.

Fixed.

10 FPS is not playable.

"The AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT clearly outperforms the GeForce 8800 GTS here. At the low end, none of our cards are playable under any option the Call of Juarez benchmark presents. While all the numbers shown here are with large shadow maps and high quality shadows, even without these features, the 2400 XT only posted about 10 fps at 1024x768. We didn't bother to test it against the rest of our cards because it just couldn't stack up." In this day and age who wants to go from 60 FPS by upgrading down to 10 FPS on new hardware and new software?

At this point

I don't think it is really useful to look at. DirectX 10 is brand new on the market so who knows how well optimised everything is? The drivers for the cards could very well need work. If you were a graphics can company what would you spend your time on: DirectX 9 which is what almost every game runs on, or DirectX 10 which there's maybe 3 game patches for? Also the games themselves may need improvements. Just because they've ported to DirectX 10, doesn't mean they did a good job of it. Any one remember the original Unreal Tournament? At its heart it was a Glide game and it just never ran as well on GL or DirectX, particularly DirectX. UT2003 was DX at its heart and ran smoking fast. It was to the point that on good DX hardware UT2003 could run faster than its predecessor, despite higher visual detail.

At this point DirectX 10 is more or less just a plaything. Cards are out supporting it, since hardware is almost always ahead of software (harder to develop for something that doesn't exist), but it is brand new and few systems support it (only systems running Vista using teh very newest graphics hardware). IT is at this point a curiosity for the most part. It's not really useful to start talking about performance until there's been a good deal more time for people to work with it, including making games designed for it, not ported to it.

What's the future like?

Current top cards (2900 and 8800) already use a lot of power, something like 200W or even more. They require powerful cooling, but it seems that every new graphics card generation tends to use a lot more power than the previous one. It's likely that a better manufacturing process (45nm?) will lower the power consumption slightly, but that's probably going to be offset by higher clocks to get it to the same thermal envelope.

What's the future of the cards' successors like? How long before graphics cards are going to be moved outside the computer, to their specialized cases? Or do you think something like Conroe will happen in the GPU market (vastly lower power consumption than the P4/Tbird, better performance on the same clock speed)? Is that even possible with GPUs and the never-ending quest for framerate and visual effects?

DX10 performance will take time

The games that Anand benchmarked with were not written from the ground up for DirectX 10. Company of Heroes was DX9 until the developers were nice enough to release a patch. Some developers have said that good DX10 performance requires writing from the ground up for DX10. Since DX10 is so different from DX9, I don't find this difficult to believe.

As soon as NVidia releases certified drivers for doing SLI in Vista. The problem with driving 30" LCDs will disappear.

People are forgetting how many years it takes to create a new AAA game title and the fact that game developers still have very little reason to be attracted to Vista. What with it's small installed base and hardware requirements for consumers.

Hardware virtualization

Personally, the most interesting feature of DX10 is the hardware virtualization, so programs can share the card. Should make it possible to play a game on one monitor while playing a movie on another, for example. Presumably these cards wouldn't have a problem with this...

possible vs. obtainable?

... a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable ...

What's the difference between "possible" and "actually obtainable"?

Harf.

The reason Microsoft couldn't reasonably do Aero under DirectX9 has to do with baselines. One of the biggest advantages of DirectX 10 has less to do with what it is and more to do with what it isn't: old. Microsoft needed a way to do two things: 1) make sure that people weren't trying to run Aero on 386es, and 2) a simply way to tell non-technical people whether or not their hardware was up to modern spec.

Does DirectX9 have all the capabilities needed to run something like Aero? Yes, but DirectX9 also runs on systems which would drag under the demands of something like Aero. Microsoft has a vested interest in preventing their new software from running on hardware which will struggle with Aero, because then there'll be a lot of people complaining about how (insert the bad side of slow Aero here.)

DirectX10 has a much higher minimum bar to entry. If your stuff is DirectX10 ready, it's almost certainly Aero ready. That's why they made the requirement - they didn't want old hardware making their shiny new product look like crap. (That it forces new hardware purchase, which gets OEMs and VARs to support the new OS, certainly helps.)

If you look at it from a business perspective at the same time that you look at it from a technical and an "oh god I have to deal with stupid users" perspective, you'll start to see why just using the DirectX name to set the new low watermark was actually a relatively simple way for Microsoft to flatten several problems at once.

let me see...

You can either use GL which is supported on virtually every platform there is, or you can go with DX10 thus limiting your market to Vista only while simultaneously taking a performance penalty... Since nobody in the right mind would go for the latter option I guess we can expect various windows bugs which adversely affect OpenGL very soon... rolled out as critical security updates of course...