Intel's long-awaited DirectX-10 graphics update for its chipsets is available.
DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling multimedia tasks in Microsoft-based environments, especially those tasks related to games and video. DirectX-10 support was mentioned by Intel as far back as 2006 when its popular 965 chipset was introduced.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
The new Windows Vista driver enables DirectX10 functionality for Intel GM965 and G35 Express chipset based platforms. The GM965 uses the X3100 Intel graphics engine, while the G35 uses the X3500.
The update is available here.
"We have been able to add features to products using these chipsets via driver updates. DX10 is the latest capability we have been able to add," an Intel representative said.
Asus is now selling a motherboard that the computer maker is billing as the "world's first to provide an Intel platform with an onboard integrated VGA solution that features built-in support for Windows Vista DirectX 10."
Intel has also announced a G35-based DG35EC Classic motherboard. The DG35EC board is based on GMA X3500 integrated graphics and includes HD video playback for movie clips and media streams without the need for an add-in video card and is the first to have integrated Microsoft DirectX10 capability with OpenGL 2.0 support, according to this report.
But don't expect top-flight gaming performance with integrated graphics--even with the new DirectX-10 driver. Typically, the frame rates in games using integrated graphics pale against the frame rates allowed by discrete graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD-ATI. More information here.
(Credit:
Microsoft Corp.)
What came first, the chicken or the egg? For PC gamers, the answer is a no brainer...The advanced hardware comes first, and the game titles that can truly take advantage of that hardware come months, if not years, later. It comes as no surprise that Microsoft's own DirectX 10 page talks about the benefits of DX10 in the future tense: "Many of the newest Windows games will take full advantage of the next-generation graphics technology in Windows Vista called DirectX 10." (Italics added.)
Game developers have little incentive right now to produce games for DX10, as you'd only be able to utilize the DX10 features of the games on systems running Vista with a fairly high-end, newer graphics card. Considering the slow adoption rate of Vista, the plethora of Vista graphics driver problems, and the cost to consumers for worthy DX10 rigs, the sweet spot for game developers is still DX9 games on Windows XP.
That's not to say that there are no DX10 games available or in the pipeline: Call of Juarez, Company of Heroes, and Lost Planet all purport to be DX10 games, as does the soon to be released World in Conflict. We've spent some time analyzing these titles and we're less than impressed with their DX10 features. Some of these are really just DX9 titles with a DX10 veneer applied that adds some graphical bells and whistles.
We compared the same title side by side on a system running DX10 on Vista to the same title on an identical system running DX9 on XP, and it's difficult--sometimes impossible--to detect significant differences in how the games look or perform.
As new titles come out, we will continue to evaluate them, hoping to find some worthy of replacing our now aging gaming benchmarks. In the meantime, our gaming benchmarks might not use the latest titles, but they are still popular titles that accurately represent the state of today's games.
Our meeting with Sierra yesterday highlighted perfectly why you'll need to be very careful in cutting through the hype surrounding the next-gen PC gaming graphics. First we sat down for a showing of World in Conflict, a real-time strategy game that asks, "What if the Cold War ran hot?"
Soft particles make the smoke in World Conflict look more natural.
(Credit: Gamespot.com)As part of the demo for World in Conflict, a producer from Sierra showed us a video hosted by the game's lead designer, highlighting the game's graphical features, specifically regarding the benefits Sierra is getting from DirectX 10. "Soft particles" was one feature the designer cited, which essentially means modeling all the little particles in a cloud of smoke, for example, so that they look and move more naturally in a game. The alternative creates a banding effect at the edges of a smoke cloud, which hurts the overall feeling of immersion.
Cool. Soft particles. Finally, we thought, DX 10 comes to life.
Our next meeting with Sierra was for TimeShift, a very detailed-looking shooter that involves time travel and does not incorporate any features of DirectX 10 in its graphics engine. And what did company reps show us when highlighting its current-generation visuals? That's right, soft particles!
We're not suggesting that anyone at Sierra is trying to pull a fast one. The features he pointed to probably are capable because of DirectX 10, at least in World in Conflict. As one of the developers of Crysis told us when we interviewed him later in the day in front of his own game: right now, it's not so much that DirectX 10 gives you the ability to incorporate any one feature that you can't do in DirectX 9. Rather, you can expect that games claiming DirectX 10 will have more of the current-gen stuff, but in varying degrees. In other words, if visuals are important to you for gaming, we'd suggest you approach any bullet lists of supposed next-gen features warily. We expect DirectX 10 will have a more significant feature-based visual impact eventually, but for now, you're probably better off looking at screenshots to determine not what but how many graphics bells and whistles a game has to offer.
We admit heading into our preview of Gearbox's Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway with some trepidation yesterday. Shooters set in World War II feel so played-out that even calling them a cliche has become a cliche. It seems that the team is trying some innovative things with its new title, though, including an attempt at making the "feel" of combat more authentic. Some new tactical features, like requiring you to lay down suppressing fire, as well as a mechanic for simulating the overall heat of combat, gave the preview we saw a unique flavor.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway takes us back to WWII.
(Credit: Gamespot.com)But the end of that meeting was even better for us, at least as far as our quest to find out about the overall adoption of DirectX 10 in the next batch of PC games on the horizon. As Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told us, we'll be in a mostly DirectX 9 world for a while yet. And when we finally get to games built from the ground up with DirectX 10, you might not even notice, because next-gen graphics features will only trickle in to new titles gradually for the next couple of years.
According to Randy, PCs using today's DirectX 10 hardware would still likely have a hard time with a pure DirectX 10 game. There's still optimization that needs to go on with the drivers and the software in general. Further, and this is a bit more obvious, few developers are going to spend a lot of time on DirectX 10 now, when so few gamers have the hardware to take advantage of it. That's also why even on the titles that do incorporate some features of DirectX 10, you won't see anything drastically better-looking, because those games are still only dabbling with the next-gen API. This explains why (in our opinion) the current crop of DirectX 10 supporting games, Call of Juarez, Company of Heroes, and Lost Planet , and don't look that much different than their DirectX 9 counterparts.
DirectX 9-based Fallout 3 still looks fantastic.
(Credit: Gamespot.com)Just prior to our meeting with Gearbox, we sat through an hour-long demo of Fallout 3, developed by Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda, if you recall, was the developer that made The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which, when it came out last year, seemed to hit the apex of DirectX 9's capabilities. The Fallout 3 demo, running on the DX9-only Xbox 360, no less, had noticeably better-looking graphics than Oblivion, despite using just a slightly updated version of the same graphics engine. Clearly, DirectX 9 still has some impressing to do.
We don't doubt that Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, and the other big PC shooters this year will look great when they launch. We also still advocate DirectX 10 hardware if you're a gamer and you've moved to Windows Vista. Even though both vendors need to work on their Vista drivers, Nvidia and ATI are making DX10 graphics cards right now that are relatively affordable and fly through games from the previous software. The only thing we'd suggest is that if you're happy with your current DirectX 9 hardware, you might wait to see what the visuals look like with these next-gen games. The newer cards do have faster clock speeds overall, but for the older cards that can get these new games running at a respectable frame rate, you might also find that you're not missing out on too much in terms of visual quality.
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