The curse of DirectX 11

It's that time again when the genius’s over at DirectX come out with their latest version and the graphics card manufacturers go mental with advertising slogans mentioning the need for the latest version. This time being DirectX 11.

The problem with this kind of upgrade and promoting it is that trying to sell it through screenshots doesn’t really work. It previously happened over DX10 with comparison shots showing how amazing DX10 was over DX9, but unless you had extra sharp vision it was hard to tell the difference. The same is happening now with DX11, recently the latest Stalker developers unleashed some screenshots of Call Of Pripyat calling to people’s attentions how amazing it looked in the new format. And yet again I can barely tell the difference.

I’m not saying that DX11 isn’t a worthy upgrade or doesn’t make any significant improvements. It probably will be a vast improvement over DX10 in terms of dynamic power, rendering and programming. It will probably allow developers to do optimise their graphics code a bit better so it runs without too much processing power.

But that’s what the DX upgrades are for. It’s streamlining the code, not impressive effects. The pretty effects are all done by the developer, even a low cost game can have really impressive visuals because of styling. We are now exiting the age when graphical ability sells the game (Crysis still being the universal benchmark for new systems) and entering a time when game developers are making their games stylised as apposed to “oh wow, look at the realism”.

So game developers trying to show the impressiveness of a DX upgrade through screenshots is ultimately pointless. You see a few extra shadows, maybe a bit where your bump-mapping rendering is a little better. And of course ATI and nVidia are pulling out their new state-of-the-art cards and trying to push DX11 in the eternal race for graphical dominance. If you want to sell me DX11, show me that it will reduce my CPU load, that older systems will be able to run state of the art games. Show me the real improvement not some minor graphical tweaks which could easily be done in DX9.

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