devil_z404
29-05-2006, 01:17 AM
DirectX 10 is an evolutionary step over the current DirectX 9 which you see today in Windows XP and earlier operating systems. It will include a plethora of features which game and application developers have been asking for from Microsoft for some time. These additions will not only make developers lives easier, they also speed up the wealth of effects and features that a title can display.
DirectX 10 also places new demands on graphics card developers (primarily Nvidia and ATI) as there are quite a few new features that they have to support. DirectX 10 breaks from tradition by not being backwards compatible with DirectX 9, however there will be a separate version of DirectX 9 in Windows Vista so legacy games should work without too many issues (well that is the theory!)
Vista has a new driver model which means that all the core system component drivers such as sound cards and graphics card drivers are not part of the OS’s system kernel but are run at the same level as the user. OK so what does that mean? Well the short explanation would be that it improves reliability as if the display or sound card drivers crash they don’t Blue screen of death (BSOD) the entire system and it can be restarted without an issue. Running in user mode has another benefit, the display drivers actually have more access to resources so they can run faster than before which will certainly help game frame rates.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the differences between DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 …
DX9:
Objects are parcels of data that are sent from the application to be processed and rendered on the graphics card. These objects can be vertex data, textures, pixel shaders or lighting data.
Under DirectX 9 there is a large overhead per object, and ATI’s famous Ruby for example is made up of around 30 objects, there is also a limit of around 500 objects per scene without slowing things to a crawl which means that worlds are fairly empty of things to interact with. This doesn’t reflect real life which most games are trying to simulate to a large degree.
DX 10:
Much smaller overhead per object which means that more objects can be utilised, making games more interesting and more fun to explore and interact with.
One thing to note:
If the same game was coded to run on both DX9 and DX10 there would be around a 20% performance increase just from the fact the overhead is lower in DX10.
DirectX 10 also places new demands on graphics card developers (primarily Nvidia and ATI) as there are quite a few new features that they have to support. DirectX 10 breaks from tradition by not being backwards compatible with DirectX 9, however there will be a separate version of DirectX 9 in Windows Vista so legacy games should work without too many issues (well that is the theory!)
Vista has a new driver model which means that all the core system component drivers such as sound cards and graphics card drivers are not part of the OS’s system kernel but are run at the same level as the user. OK so what does that mean? Well the short explanation would be that it improves reliability as if the display or sound card drivers crash they don’t Blue screen of death (BSOD) the entire system and it can be restarted without an issue. Running in user mode has another benefit, the display drivers actually have more access to resources so they can run faster than before which will certainly help game frame rates.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the differences between DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 …
DX9:
Objects are parcels of data that are sent from the application to be processed and rendered on the graphics card. These objects can be vertex data, textures, pixel shaders or lighting data.
Under DirectX 9 there is a large overhead per object, and ATI’s famous Ruby for example is made up of around 30 objects, there is also a limit of around 500 objects per scene without slowing things to a crawl which means that worlds are fairly empty of things to interact with. This doesn’t reflect real life which most games are trying to simulate to a large degree.
DX 10:
Much smaller overhead per object which means that more objects can be utilised, making games more interesting and more fun to explore and interact with.
One thing to note:
If the same game was coded to run on both DX9 and DX10 there would be around a 20% performance increase just from the fact the overhead is lower in DX10.