Current DX10 Cards will not be able to support DX10.1

[mp666]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/11/0524250
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41577
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Drops-the-Bomb-DirectX-10-Hardware-Won-039-t-Support-DirectX-10-1-62482.shtml

[madmat]

I saw a slideshow from M$ on this and in the slideshow it clearly states that DX10.1 will be supported by current DX10 generation hardware. Sadly I can't find the link to that slideshow.

Edit: Ah-ha, here it is (http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070808/direct3d-101-siggraph/)! Now, look at page three and where it says RefRast/SDKLayers support both D3D10 & 10.1 devices. It leads me to believe that this isn't as bad as it's being made out to be.

[nicolasb]

DX10 cards will not support DX10.1. However, the two APIs are close enough that it will be easy for developers to ensure that any actual game written for DX10.1 will also run using plain DX10, and that there will not be substantial differences when it does.

It's a little bit like the situation with newer games now - they contain both a DX9 path, and a DX10 path. However, DX10.1 is an awful lot closer to DX10 than DX10 is to DX9.

[mp666]

mat

thnx for the link but at the same page it reads ( I also downloaded a pdf version, I'll look at it, too):

-Will require Windows Vista SP1</li>
-Not supported by current-generation DX10 hardware
-Extension& to Direct3D 10 -complete D3D10
-5 new api
-Improves rendering quality
-Enforces floating point 32 rendering
-Enforces 4x multi-sample anti-aliasing

However I don't think all these will be of important significance for the owners of current DX10 cards as nearly all the links on my first post mention that the new DX is not likely to make a difference for the game developers.

I am just practicing my new religion, FUDdhism <g>.

[Sphere]

Looks like some misinformation, The facts are below.

Microsoft's Sam Glassenberg told Next-Gen in a phone interview, "DX10.1 fully supports DX10 hardware. No hardware support is being removed....It's strictly a superset. It's basically an update to DX10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly."

He said that the update is similar to what Microsoft did with DX9. "We did make updates to [DX9] that extended the supported feature set.

"All the hardware is still supported, all the games still run, all the features are still there, we've just simply extended the feature set and the lifetime of the API," he said...

Glassenberg conceded that "There will be new features [with DX10.1], and those features may be exposed on new hardware, but this is similar to the model that we had with DX9...[except] with DX10.1, we're saying [to developers], 'if you want to support the new features, you have to support all of them [including original DX10 features].'"...

Even though DX10.1 will support current DX10 graphics hardware, today's DX10 hardware will not be able to support all of the features of DX10.1, which includes incremental improvements to 3D rendering quality....

Glassenberg also addressed rumors that DX10--currently exclusive to Vista--would be coming to Microsoft's Windows XP. It seems that DX10's Vista exclusivity is unlikely to change.

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6824&Itemid=2

[mp666]

Well, no misinformation. What you posted just confirms everything that were posted before it.

[Sphere]

It will support some features of 10.1 but not all, which is a big difference from not supporting any features.

[nicolasb]

It will support some features of 10.1 but not all, which is a big difference from not supporting any features.That's actually wrong, for an important reason: one of the things that changed in DX10 was that they did away with "cap bits". In DX9 a card can advertise itself as being DX9-compliant even if it doesn't support quite a lot of DX9 features. The game has to ask the drivers "do you support this feature...? do you support that feature...?" for each one, and mix and match behaviour accordingly.

From DX10 onwards, there are no longer any features that are optional: either you support all of them, or you're not compliant with that version of DirectX. The game will ask the drivers "do you support DX10.1?" and will get the answer "yes" or "no" - and that's the only question it will ask, and the only two possible answers. Thus, unless a graphics card fully supports every feature of DX10.1, it is not compatible with DX10.1 at all.

However, it remains the case that most of the features present in DX10.1 are also present in DX10, so a game can use DX10 and DX10-compliant hardware to do nearly all of the things that it could do with DX10.1-compliant hardware.

[mp666]

@Sphere
It will support some features of 10.1 but not all, which is a big difference from not supporting any features.
Not really. This simply ensures that the current bunch of DX10 cards will be not DX10.1 compliant. As I said before it's not a big deal since game developers won't have big problems.

@nicolasb
hus, unless a graphics card fully supports every feature of DX10.1, it is not compatible with DX10.1 at all.

However, it remains the case that most of the features present in DX10.1 are also present in DX10, so a game can use DX10 and DX10-compliant hardware to do nearly all of the things that it could do with DX10.1-compliant hardware

Exactly.

[Sphere]

From DX10 onwards, there are no longer any features that are optional: either you support all of them, or you're not compliant with that version of DirectX.


Thanks guys, now I understand what your saying.