techETA » DirectX 11

XFX Radeon HD 5770 when reference designs suffice

Rafael Hernandez — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:44:29 +0000

If there’s one thing you can count on when a new graphics chip is launched is that there will be a reference design which means, more or less, every single board at launch will sport the same speeds and designs so choosing one depends on what sort of image you like on the card’s cooler.

XFX carries on that fine tradition with their Radeon HD 5770 graphics card. You’ll get all of the great mid-range performance you want without the tough decisions. Hardware Secrets has the review:

This model, also known as HD-577A-ZNFC, comes with 1 GB, two DVI outputs, one HDMI output and one DisplayPort output, following the reference model from AMD. This video card allows you to use up to three video monitors at the same time as a single desktop, feature known as “Eyefinity”. But there is a catch: the third monitor must use the DisplayPort connector, which is still not popular.

I lacks the Eyefinity prowess that its big brothers sport but three monitors is nothing to sneeze at either.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 flaunts inspired gaming prowess

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:08:35 +0000

The mid-range isn’t the mid-range you remember, it’s now what used to be last generation’s high-end, performance-wise at least. It’s all a little confusing but given the price/performance ratios offered by these new products it’s not hard to figure out why an upgrade is so tempting.

Rage3D has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 graphics card and its DirectX 11 supporting ways. It’s no 5870 but it’s sure to handle most of your budget gaming needs:

In some circumstances the HD5770 outperforms the HD4870, thanks to a high engine clock and plenty of GDDR5, and in others the reduced memory bandwidth shows itself; but really this card is the average gamers hero, offering HD gaming performance, Eyefinity, Dx11 and more as well as great HTPC features.

Intriguing to say the least. Budget based CrossFire anyone?

AMD Hopes to Push "Open Physics"

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:36:00 +0000

Gaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.

AMD has joined up with Pixelux Entertainment in order to develop an open source alternative physics engine that should be able to run on any OpenCL or DirectX 11 DirectCompute capable graphics card or hardware.

Interesting approach but, then again, there are only so many graphics chip makers and Intel, with Havok, and Nvidia, with PhysX, have already staked their claim.

AMD Announces Open Physics Initiative Designed to Bring New Levels of Realism to Gaming, Simulations, Popular Applications

Open and Industry Standards-based ATI Stream Technology Frees Industry from Proprietary Implementations

SUNNYVALE, Calif. –(Business Wire)– Sep 30, 2009 AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Pixelux Entertainment announced a joint development agreement that is part of the AMD effort to greatly expand the use of real-time physics with graphics through the open source Bullet Physics engine. By encouraging development of physics middleware built around OpenCL™ and Bullet Physics, AMD and Pixelux offer a route toward physics simulation that spans game consoles, PCs and other hardware platforms. The latest graphics technologies, like the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series of GPUs, offer incredible visual fidelity and high performance physics simulation by taking the next step in realistically animating how rendered game objects move, deform and break.

“Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and ISVs, while stifling true innovation; our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs,” said Eric Demers, chief technology officer for graphics at AMD. “By working with Pixelux and others to enable open support of physics on OpenCL and DirectX® 11 capable devices we are taking the exact opposite approach.”

As the latest software developer to take advantage of ATI Stream technology to leverage multi-core CPUs and GPUs to accelerate execution of highly parallel functions, Pixelux will enable game developers to offer improved performance and interactivity across a broad range of OpenCL capable PCs. AMD is also actively pursuing support of Bullet Physics via the DirectCompute API in DirectX 11.

“Pixelux wants to ensure that our technology can take advantage of the computing resources that any particular hardware platform offers without locking in our users to any single platform,” said Mitchell Bunnell, CEO of Pixelux. “By working with AMD to run our software in OpenCL we stay true to that goal.”

Pixelux is an industry leader in material physics simulation based on the Finite Element Method. After many years of exclusivity, Pixelux has announced they will be providing a new version of its Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) System that can be licensed by anyone and that more easily integrates with other physics systems. This new version of DMM will feature integration with the free and open source Bullet Physics engine. DMM and Bullet are designed to operate together to enable players to experience visually and kinetically realistic worlds where objects react as they do in real-life. From crumbling stone walls, denting metal, splintering wooden beams and even swaying organic plant life, the combination of DMM and Bullet Physics, will be designed to enable users to experience the next generation of physics as never before and offer an amazing solution for game developers and incredible realism for players.

Additional detail on ATI Stream technology can be found at www.amd.com/stream.

About AMD

Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and technology partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

About Pixelux Entertainment

Pixelux was founded in October 2003 with the mission of automating art asset production through physical simulation. Pixelux’s Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) technology has been designed to take full advantage of GPUs and multiprocessor cores to achieve an unprecedented degree of simulation realism in the creation of real-time or cinematic simulations where objects can bend, crack and shatter all according to their physical properties. DMM Technology is available for PCs and Macs. Pixelux is a member of middleware programs for both the PlayStation®3 and Xbox 360™ and is available on a variety of popular game engines.

ATI Radeon Eyefinity, flight simmers get their prayers answered

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:57:00 +0000

Multi-monitor solutions over the years have ranged from astounding driver nightmares to expensive third party solutions and, in the end, never really came into form when supporting gaming across multiple displays.

AMD seeks to change all of that with their upcoming ATI Radeon Eyefinity technology which should be showing up on their next generation DirectX 11 supporting cards. HardOCP has seen the 7680×3200 promised land:

What you are seeing below is a single air cooled AMD next-gen video card in a consumer ATX case powering six LCD displays. No tricks, no switches. Six 30" LCD panels with DisplayPort, and one "Evergreen" video card. This card is a future product that will likely be for sale around the holidays, but on launch day every card will support no less than 3 displays.

It is an exciting product, hopefully we’ll see a return to super sampling anti-aliasing in older titles with all of that extra horsepower under the hood.

AMD's DirectX 11 Preview, Evergreens Uncanny Valley Making Prowess

Rafael Hernandez — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:16:00 +0000

Microsoft’s upcoming WIndows 7 launch will bring with it another important piece of software for gamers, DirectX 11 (which will also support Vista). Ok DX11 is targeted at much more than just the gaming segment (GPGPU usage for one) but it’s set to do some might impressive stuff on the graphics front.

AMD showed off their latest DirectX 11 graphics card hardware at QuakeCon and a few lucky gamers got a chance to scope it out. Legit Reviews has a writeup on what went down:

AMD had five or six SDK demonstrations that showed off the power and features of this new DirectX 11 graphics card. One of the demonstrations that best shows the differences would be their main tessellation demo. This SDK has three different rendering mode and the most basic of these modes is bump mapping. Bump mapping is a computer graphics technique to make a rendered surface look more realistic by modeling the interaction of a bumpy surface texture with lights in the environment. Bump mapping does this by changing the brightness of the pixels on the surface in response to a heightmap that is specified for each surface. On the DirectX 11 graphics card running D3D11 at 2560×1600 the framerate was observed at 494 frames per second (FPS).

More graphical eye-candy coming your way with improved performance and snazzy features for developers to exploit.

DirectX 11 Compute Shader Leads to Speed Up, Sharing is a "Killer Feature"

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:35:00 +0000

You can’t fault AMD’s Richard Huddy for being a little enthusiastic about Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 and the features it brings along for graphics cards. The graphics API’s "Local Data Share" capability is, in his words, the killer feature which should allow for some impressive performance improvement.

Different program threads running on the card will be able to access information from each other quickly compared to past implementations leading to "up to three times the performance possible with DirectX 10.1"

Speedy! Although it’d be nice to know what performance implications this means for GPGPU performance.

Source: PC Games Hardware

Windows 7's Direct3D Improvements, DirectX 11 Brings Whole Lots of Changes

Rafael Hernandez — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:41:00 +0000

You may have mistaken Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system as a gussied up and streamlined version of their previous operating systems but you’d be ingoring the changes under the hood that are set to make it one of the most important consumer OS ever.

Tech ARP has a look at what changes are in store for Direct3D and DirectX 11 in general. Here’s a peek:

Direct3D 10-Level-9 is a specialized driver for the Direct3D 10 runtime. Therefore, game developers get the higher performance of the Direct3D 10 runtime (versus the Direct3D 9 runtime) while still targeting the Direct3D 9 hardware.

It’ll probably go over many people’s heads but it’s exciting stuff knowing that performance will actually improve this time around and GPGPU applications may finally gain some traction on the desktop.

ATI's Touts First DirectX 11 GPU

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:45:00 +0000

AMD has been firing on all cylinders lately, well at least their ATI graphics division has. The company showed off the world’s first Microsoft DirectX 11 capable graphics chip at Computex and it’s quite impressive.

Trusted Reviews has a look at their presentation and what it means for our enthusiast gaming future:

The former is something we’ve talked about at length before and indeed
is something that AMD has supported on its graphics cards since the HD
3000 series (also on the Xbox 360). However, it’s only with DX11 that
there will be a universal platform that takes advantage of these card’s
capabilities. Tesselation, then, is the ability to smooth out the
polygonal surfaces that make up 3D scenes by interpolating extra
polygons between those of the base model. With hardware acceleration
this can essentially be done for free where normally such high polygon
counts would massively impact on performance. The long and short of it
is 3D models will look considerably smoother and more realistic without
performance dropping significantly.

Tessellation and the compute functions found in DirectX 11 will make our games look more realistic and harness the power of the GPU for things other than gaming.

Windows 7 Does GPGPU Video Transcoding Natively

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:14:00 +0000

Well this certainly came out of nowhere. Microsoft is usually the first to tout their own perceived advancements but this may come as a shocker and a definite selling point for their next operating system Windows 7.

bit-tech was on hand as the company displayed Windows 7 doing video transcoding on an Nvidia Ion platform making full use of its GPU to change a video’s scale. Here’s a bit from their news piece:

The implementation was seamless as Henry simply dragged and dropped the
high definition video file onto a Sony Walkman portable media player in
Windows Explorer, where it automatically started transferring the file
onto the Walkman.

The demo included an Ion-based machine and another, similarly specced
machine without Nvidia integrated graphics – the Nvidia-based machine
finished the transcoding task around five times faster than the
Atom-based PC with Intel integrated graphics, taking just over 1 minute
30 to complete.

This is some highly interesting work done by the boys at Redmond.

Microsoft's DirectX 11, More Gaming Joy?

Rafael Hernandez — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:25:00 +0000

Microsoft’s DirectX 10 graphics API promised us all a much richer visual experience when titles and graphics cards made full use of the technology, given how long new features take to work into game development things didn’t turn out so well. Oh the graphics did improve but DX10 titles regularly lagged in performance compared to DX9 games.

DirectX 11 is Microsoft’s response promising much better efficiency and better support for multiple cores, which should improve on performance, all the while adding new visual tricks for developers to take advantage of. Betanews has a look at what it’s all about:

The biggest evidence that Microsoft has learned its lesson comes from the fact that DirectX 11 will work on graphics cards rated for DX9 and DX10.
During the Vista era, to run DX10 you needed a DX10 card. This doesn’t
mean that all of DX11′s features run on a DX11 card, but what it does
mean is that it doesn’t exclude older hardware and, in so doing, rate
it a second-class citizen.

Support for older cards, graphical and performance improvements, GPGPU support? It all sounds very impressive!