DirectX9 vs DirectX10 *again*

This is true the only really useful thing its useful for (off the top of my head) is breaking up particles intersection planes and anyway I don't think DX10 supports the required states anyway...

 

Yes you can actually (although I wasn't in a plane in my water simulation demo and the BM really didn't jump up and say "look, this is BM!" due to the speed I chosed for the camera, which can be from the POV of a hovering helicopter in a simulation-type situation). However, it's possible you missed the letter "s" in the word "low" and if that was the case then you're right.

 

A lot of air ports are surrounded by water, especially in the area in which the aircraft decends/ascends, so you do get a good view on takeoffs and landings. Even land locked air ports I have flown in and out of, thinking back many had lake(s) in this area. My experience is limited to about a couple dozen runways, but I can remember seeing a lot of bodies of water around air ports. And landing in an island in the Pacific... wow, very pretty. This sort of technology would be great for that. And while the above shader may not represent this well, I know that flying over the Pacific ocean that you frequently can see a bit of detail (waves, large foam floats,) and the sun reflecting off of those. I believe we used to fly ~35-39k feet (been a while, so I could be a little off) and I used to stair out the windows at the water because it was so pretty and brilliantly blue. These two pictures (here and here) are not perfect, but do give a general idea.

You wouldn't think that you could see much detail at that altitude, but you surprisingly can. At least on a clear sunny day.

 

No, it wouldn't help. You'd have to be so low to the water that you can see the silhouettes of the crests of the waves against the sky. That's just not happening in an aircraft.

Even self-occluding waves, which is a bit easier to accomplish, also would only very rarely make a difference (partially because you'd have to be very low, though not quite as low as to see the silhouettes against the sky, and partially because the contrast will be low enough that any improvement in this area will be hard to notice anyway).

If the waves use some rough geometry (which these apparently do), then even parallax mapping won't make much difference.

The primary thing with water waves in a flight sim won't be any of these techniques, but rather the quality of the light interaction with the surface. The above techniques are primarily for the simulation of more rigid objects in first- and third-person games, such as simulating high-poly models with few polygons, simulating bricks on a flat surface, etc.

But water is a different beast. Polygon edges are pretty much invisible. It's all about how you deal with light bouncing off of the surface, how you animate the water, and how the water interacts with the shore. These challenges are actually quite a bit more difficult to overcome than simple parallax mapping (or even more advanced forms of parallax mapping).

Think about it. When you want good-looking water, you want to see the sun splayed realistically off the surface at sunset. You want to see waves breaking realistically on the shoreline. You want to see whitecaps in windy weather. You want to see realistic reflections, refractions, and opacity of the water. All of these things are difficult, and none of them is helped by parallax mapping.

 

Here are the actual "screenshots" so that you can compare dx9 with dx10 a bit better. Note, the dx10 "screenshot" isnt an actual screenshot rendered in real time by a dx10 card, simply because there arent any dx10 cards.

Quoted from extremetech (regarding the dx10 "screenshot") : "This isn't an in-game screenshot, but it's a test render of what the Flight Sim team honestly believes they can achieve in DirectX 10. The leap over DX9 is pretty dramatic".

Flight Simulator X : Dx9 mode

Flight Simulator X : Dx10 mode

Source of the screenshots. You can read the article from the start here.

PS I love thread digging, dont you?

 

Yes, we've seen these. Rather old shots, and the DX9 shot is vastly below the capabilities of DX9 hardware.

 

Depends on what you mean by that.

Performance wise? No not really. At least in the demo the game performed horribly.

 

Quite frankly, even at almost lowest settings the demo still ran like tripe. Seems almost like there's a limiting factor there somewhere...wether it's poor coding (hard to believe), lack of optimization (likely), or lack of optimization due to a rushed demo or something (still unlikely, they weren't really under pressure)..

But needless to say, compared to that DX9 screenshot, the demo on ultra-hight STILL looked like a dx8 game at BEST. Something just aint right with it yet.

 

Even Everquest 2 has better water than that (if you set the options right), and it doesn't even use more than DX8-level shaders.

 

I call photoshop on that Flight sim X D3D10 water.
Its far too good (& thus mathematically complex) compared to official screen shots & the largely unimproved rest of the scene.

You can also see the exact same reflection as the D3D9 water showing through & if the surface effect had been improved that much by D3D10, it would have improved the reflection similarly.

[edit just saw NIBs post, evaluating from originals now]

Definitely a photoshop job, look at the blurry shrubery & clearly drawn on lighter shoreline (doesn't actually match the real shoreline).
That surface rippling has got to be layered in from a photo.

 

Yet when does EQ2 have to draw a VAST amount of water from various distances. You'll want to keep the detail down.

 

No, it really doesn't matter. Drawing reasonably-good water with reflections and bump mapping doesn't take much work at all, particularly in the context of a flight sim where there is very little to draw anyway.

 

Yeah, uh...it's a render?

Makes sense that it would be subject to some post-render touchups.

 

This is Microsoft flight simulator; is it really surprising they are trying to downplay DX9 in favor of DX10 considering one must buy Vista to get it.

 

Its not even a render, its an, and i quote, "This is an artist's concept image of what DirectX 10 will look like.".


I got all excited too until i read that, then i didnt give a damn.

IL2 Pacific, FarCry, Oblivion, Half Life 2, EQ2, Silent Hunter III, all have very good looking water compared to what i was flying over in the demo. To be frank looked terrible and flat, lacked depth and colour. Once you got some altitude, say 1000Meters up, it wasnt so bad. I had every setting boosted too, stutter city, and it really didnt look that great at all. That artist's concept image is a HUGE improvement over what i saw.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/images/oblivion/water2.JPG Oblivion
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/135/il2fb20060117192342285on.jpg IL2 (DX8 shaders i think, game is over a year old)
http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2005/087/reviews/919601_20050329_screen002.jpg (SH III, wish i could find a hosted pic of this game in a storm, or when the ocean is swelling, water looks awesome)
http://img.hexus.net/v2/gaming/screenshots/hl2_coast/hl2_coast_large_6.jpg HL2
Now FS X
http://www.flightsim.com/notams06/fsx0104/grab_241.jpg

And it infact gets WORSE as you get closer to it. Has to make ya chuckle a little

Common sense would tell me they did something intentionally to make it look like crap. The game is after all suppose to be one of the first to showcase the power of DX10, so why not make the game look as bad as possible in DX9 but you can still get away with it? (its very comparable to the previos FS game) This is what happened with the dismal improvement SM3.0 gave visually over 2.0 or a 2.0 extension so what was shown first, by Nvidia i believe, were screenshots comparing PS3.0 to PS1.1. Intentionally downplay what currently is available to make the average joe consumer sound off a bigger "WOW!" effect. I mean really, whos going to be satisfied or pleased if the game looks almost identicle in DX9 as it does in DX10? And you know thats what would of happened this early in DX10s life cycle. DX10 is Microsofts baby to marketing the OS to enthusaist gamers, hell, all gamers. They NEED to make the leap look as impressive as possible, even if they use tactics of poor taste. The only thing that bothers me is the performance which is terrible considering the grahics. I hope thats not something they plan to magically fix when its run on Vista with a DX10 card too because that would be a very lame tactic indeed. Graphics, okay, but trashing the performance intentionally for everyone but DX10 Vista users would really be bad.

 

Water and sky is OK but what aboput the mountains and vegetation. I don't see any difference in them. They look unrealistic in both versions.

 

Uhm.. I'm trying to remember the last time a company tried to show the difference between their product featuring a new super duper shader model and the "plain old" version.. now.. this is between SM4 and SM2 (since they don't say dx9.1, so it has to be dx9 hence sm2.0) .. last time it was SM3 vs. SM1.4(which someone said it was SM2.0, remember the headlines?)

all in all -> B$ .. no reason to get exited..

 

By stretching the normal definition of 'render', you could sort of say that the output from photoshop was a 'render' but with the same stretched definition you could also call the Rydermark pics 'renders' too

 

This could happened based on the lower CPU overhead. It is reduced from D3D9 because you will need fewer calls to configure the whole pipeline. Additional you have the reduced overhead from the new Vista driver model. This means that if you try to output the same number of objects with D3D10 you will need fewer CPU power compared to D3D9 on Windows XP.

But as the number of people with D3D10 hardware will be very low at start we will see D3D9 games for a long time. I even expect a slower migration to SM4 than we have see for SM3 as D3D10 breaks backward compatibility completely.

 

There is no DX9.1.