DirectX 11 games

All these improvements are useful, but when will they appear in games? The approximate roadmap has been as follows:

• BattleForge from EA Phenomic -- September 2009
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat from GSC Gameworld -- Q4'2009
• DiRT 2 from Codemasters -- Q4'2009
• Lord of the Rings Online from Turbine -- Q1'2010
• Alien vs. Predator from Rebellion -- Q1'2010

Besides, Frostbite 2 Engine from EA DICE and Vision Engine from Trinigy are also ready for DX11, but release dates of games based on these engines are not officially announced yet. So even this optimistic list makes it clear that real hardware support for DirectX 11 will come in handy only in 2010, and you will probably have to look really hard to find any improvements at first. But on the whole, we are glad that AMD started to cooperate with game developers.

Alien vs. Predator

Alien vs Predator is one of the long-awaited games. AMD and Rebellion unanimously say that it will be the first big-budget games with sterling support for DirectX 11. This game will support DX9 (probably console heritage) and DX11 API. It promises the following features of the latest API version to accelerate the game and improve the picture: tessellation of the character model and environment surfaces. They can be seen in the following pictures:

These specially prepared pictures show the difference, but it's not that big (especially on the first one). Let's see what happens in reality, and whether such level of detail makes sense. Besides, Aliens vs Predator promises fast postprocessing of high quality using Compute Shaders and more realistic shaders (including ambient occlusion).

This difference is hard to detect. We leave it up to you. Let's hope this difference will be bigger in the real game.

Colin McRae: DiRT 2

That's another interesting game people are looking forward to, which uses the new features of DirectX 11. Its PC version seems to be delayed till the end of the year, while its console versions have been already released. Probably AMD tries hard to offer sterling DirectX 11 support.

Representatives of the game developer announced that the game engine was ported to DirectX 11. It uses dynamic tessellation of water surfaces, cloth (flags, etc), animated characters. The screenshot below shows a wireframe render of the water surface through which a car is driving. It looks good, but you don't actually pay attention to such effects at full speed:

The game also uses DirectCompute11 to optimize postprocessing effects. The new features of Shader Model 5.0 were used for shadow map filtering of higher quality and good depth of field. Besides, we are really happy to announce that the game will have a built-in benchmark! That's what the right support from the GPU manufacturer means.

Besides, we can mention the above-mentioned S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. AMD promises DX11 support in this project as well, but we don't know when it will be added: at the time of the release or in future patches, as it happened with the previous versions.

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