Crysis Demo - DX10 vs DX9 Up Close

[Craig]

Check out this link that shows you the differences between DX10 and DX9 in the Crysis demo. There's some interesting points to be noted that I had not noticed myself.

In both versions, waves moving across the surface ripple your view of what is above the water. The difference here is subtle. In the DX9 version, the trees and sky above look like they would above water, except for this ripple. In the DX10 version, the colors above the water are slightly altered, creating a sense that the water you're in is not 100% clear.

If you look closely at the trees in the DX10 version, you can even see the water actually refracts the light into the rainbow

Ok, that's pretty damn cool...now bring us a single slot video card that can do this at full 1600x1200 or 1920x1200 resolution Nvidia or ATi!!

[Dukefrukem]

wow i could care less about those differences, i remember videos being a lot more distinct than that

[jcll2002]

pretty sweet but nothing im going to spend $600 for.

[Boogieman117]

my opinion exactly

The 7950GTX w/ DX9 > 8700M w/ DX10 so far

[Relly]

Nice post Craig.

I heard there's a patch out there that allows those of us with DX9 or unfortunately limited to DX9 because it's only available for Vista to set our graphics options to very high.

I have a link, but I haven't tried it, therefore I wont link anyone to it not knowing if it actually works or not.

Besides, if I only get 30fps with everything on high, fuck putting it on very high.

[Rage1]

even if you have vista you still have to have the rig to set the game on very high and I don't think theres alot of people who do.

[Trivium Nate]

This game looks so god damn sexy! lol
I love how it looks no game beats it When this game is on very high

[Dopefish]

This whole statement leads up to something.

I've stated it for awhile that there really shouldn't be all that much difference between DX9 and DX10 graphically. There are indeed some differences, but they are often quite minor. Lighting is probably the biggest difference. However, DX10 allows some functions that used to demand a lot before now use less resources. Using these optimized functions allows you to improve other areas of the game with less of a hit on performance.

Think of it this way:
Function A used to demand 50% which left 50% for everything else.
Function A now uses only 25%. This leaves 75% to dish out among everything else, or even include some things that were excluded before.

With that being said, though, you can be sure EA is in bed with MS and MS wants to promote DX10. So what does this mean? It means leaving some things out of DX9 to make DX10 look great.

However, at least in Crysis, you still have the ability to enable most of these features in XP with DX9 (because they were never really DX10 exclusive to begin with).

[Trivium Nate]

If someone was to ask me what DX10 is what would i say to them? I'm so lost as to what it really is

[VincentVega]

it's a video API.