DX10 fun.. Whats to come??

#1 From a technical perspective, I think it's all pretty exciting. Of course, as an OpenGL developer it's a bit less exciting since I'll be waiting for either nVidia or Khronos to get some extensions out so OpenGL can use all the spiffy new features, but still the capability is there. Though, admittedly, GLSL can take advantage of most of the new shader features (with the exception of geometry shaders) immediately, which is pretty spiffy.

On the other hand, I don't see this changing anything. Most games still don't even take advantage of SM3, much less SM4. And since Dx10 will only be available on Vista, it will probably be a while before enough people have Dx10 capable computers to make it worthwhile to pursue Dx10 support.

Edit: nVidia released over a dozen new OpenGL extensions for the 8800. I'm a bit more excited now.

#2 I dunno, I mean, ok, people havent gone for SM3 because it didnt really offer huge differences. But the SM4 stuff really IS that much more powerful. Almost as big a leap as fixed function to shader usage was.

Of course, it doesnt mean much to most indie developments, but if your interested in leading edge or just graphics stuff, its exciting.

#3 I'm pumped, especially since my first 8800GTX arrived (it's a beast, towers over my old twin 7800s and humilates my older twin 7600GTs, haven't ran TGEA on it yet though). Can't wait for vista now.

I don't think there's a complete DX10 sdk available though, just preview versions for use on Vista (of course one has to exist somewhere [in the hands of major studios of course]) is all I was able to find.

#4 Gah, its so tempting to buy a quad-core 8800 sli beast machine.. soooo tempting!

#5 Man, I just upgraded to 7800 GTX SLI. Will wait for Vista before upgrading to 8800. Maybe the price will have gone down a fraction by then.

#6 You can get all the DX10 stuff any studio gets if you get MSDN subscription.

#7 When did these come out?

I haven't seen anyone selling them in the UK and I'm in San Francisco at the moment and circuit city laughed when I asked about the card this afternoon.

I should also second what Phil said about anyone with an MSDN subscription having access to all of DX10. Had it for a while now but, no card that will run it in anything other than reference mode i.e. slow motion!

#8 I'm not too excited, especially not if DX10 will require Vista, of which I'm not upgrading to in the nearest future.

I got my 6800 and I can run any games I want just fine.

#9 DX10 seems like it has some nice features, but I really doubt many games will be using it or shader model 4.0 to its potential for several years.

#10 I just saw them on the market yesterday (day after launch) ordered one next day, arrived by 1pm.

@Matt, I agree and disagree. I think that shader model 4 won't be a requirement for a while, but as long as the source and unreal engines (and the others) continue to exist and improve, I'm sure shader model 4 will get support.

-----------------

I'm really impressed with it thus far, nothing phases it except TGEA which kicks it in the balls.

You would think that if it can run oblivion at 1280x1024 4xAA 4xAniso with everything maxed out at 50+ frames, you'd think it'd stomp a simple little TGEA demo. Nope.

Oddly the first TGEA download that appeared in the "product download" thing performs faster than the TGEA4.1 currently in there. The 4.1 version dips down into the 90's or 70's during the kork dance (every setting maxed out at 1280x1024 while the earlier one never drops below 115fps. I did notice before putting the 8800GTX in that my twin 7800s performed better on the newer version than the older one.

----------------

I'll have to go get the sdk and try my hand at adding DX10 support. Already have two vista betas both late enough that they have DX10 (or so it says).

#11 *Starts a new savings account*

#12 One of the reasons I'm actually considering getting an 8800, apart from SM4 support, which I really want to try, is that I want to try NVPerfHud and the profiling tools on TSEA.

From what I can tell, there is still a good bit of speed we can gather, but in order to know, I need to sit down and profile the crap out of the code.

I'm sure Brian has some ideas for speedups too. But hey, I think we can all help. It would probably be too 8800 specific if only one of us did it. But an in depth profiling of all torque platforms would be interesting (I'd like to profile TGE 1.5 too just to see how really dumb it is these days :))

#13 Why get an 8800 just to run nvperfhud? :p

I'd take one too though hah

#14 Because all my vid cards are ATI now (they give me freebies every now and then).

So, I need an nvidia card, might as well get the new flagship.

#15

Quote:
So, I need an nvidia card, might as well get the new flagship

Hey, that sounds a lot like my reasoning to go out an buy an XBox360! ;-)

#16 @Phil:

that makes sense then :p There is an ATI profiler/perf piece of software.. GPU PerfStudio.. Havent ever looked at it though, since I'm on an nvidia card

#17 I wonder how difficult it would be to duplicate the direct3d9 of TGEA and modify it to run for direct3d10? After looking at the documentation for directx3d 10 it looks like there were some pretty major changes beyond what I would expect M$ to call major (after all major to them is a security exploit which can only be exploited by 6 machines in the universe [being xerox parc machines] all of which are in museums [maybe not really but it sounds better]).

#18 From a whole different point of view i'm not exited about dx10 at all in it's current state. Mainly because it requires the memory hog windows vista to run. I had the RC1 on my computer for about a week... i'm glad i got rid of it.

#19 @Robin,

On identical hardware I've got more free memory available to Vista than to XP pro (service pack 1, which is even better than service pack 2 in the memory department). I hate the interface changes to the start menu but I haven't had a problem. I suppose video card could play an factor in how much memory vista uses seeing how I've only ran it on DX10 hardware and nothing from the dark ages of DX9.

#20 Running vista business, have the aero turned off, and i have stripped it down much the same way you can strip down XP, and here on this laptop (dual core amd, 1gb ram, nvidia geforce 6### go) there is a slightperformance increase even.