For my point of view DX10.1 has lots of really useful features. Our new renderer is a fully deferred one, and DX10.1 seems to have focused on improving the shortcomings on that side.
Subsample reading allows me to finally do proper antialiasing. Currently we need to either do a edge-detect blur filter in post process pass, or render everything in 2x1 (or 2x2) resolution and downsample the result in combine pass (or both for best quality). Subsample reading both improves the AA quality and speeds up the rendering, and it helps the shadow map rendering as well. This is the hands down biggest feature in DX10.1.
Separate blend modes for MRT is also useful when rendering complex volumetric effects to deferred buffers (you need separate blending modes for particle normals, volume density accumulation and other parameters). But it's not that important for basic rendering. I can easily life without it (and most likely we spend resources on something else instead of it).
It's also good that they finally properly support Gather4, instead of the current Fetch4 hack implementation. We are using Fetch4 in lots of our post process filters, so it's a good thing to have it in DX10.1 feature list. Soon all the Fetch4 optimizations will be usable on Geforces as well (or I am hoping so at least).
For me cube maps in texture arrays is just a small and natural incremental feature addition to the texture array operation. It can be used improve ambient lighting quality, but storing huge amount of cubemaps is going to consume a lot of memory, and is not going to feasible in most real games (compared to a small one room ATI techdemo). It's a fun feature to play around with in the future, but certainly not something that resolves the whole realtime global illumination problem, like PR and marketing departments like to say
Subsample reading allows me to finally do proper antialiasing. Currently we need to either do a edge-detect blur filter in post process pass, or render everything in 2x1 (or 2x2) resolution and downsample the result in combine pass (or both for best quality). Subsample reading both improves the AA quality and speeds up the rendering, and it helps the shadow map rendering as well. This is the hands down biggest feature in DX10.1.
Separate blend modes for MRT is also useful when rendering complex volumetric effects to deferred buffers (you need separate blending modes for particle normals, volume density accumulation and other parameters). But it's not that important for basic rendering. I can easily life without it (and most likely we spend resources on something else instead of it).
It's also good that they finally properly support Gather4, instead of the current Fetch4 hack implementation. We are using Fetch4 in lots of our post process filters, so it's a good thing to have it in DX10.1 feature list. Soon all the Fetch4 optimizations will be usable on Geforces as well (or I am hoping so at least).
For me cube maps in texture arrays is just a small and natural incremental feature addition to the texture array operation. It can be used improve ambient lighting quality, but storing huge amount of cubemaps is going to consume a lot of memory, and is not going to feasible in most real games (compared to a small one room ATI techdemo). It's a fun feature to play around with in the future, but certainly not something that resolves the whole realtime global illumination problem, like PR and marketing departments like to say
