DirectX 10.1: Supported by Electronic Arts, Sega and Counting…

Perhaps, DirectX 10.1 is not an immediate success, but it is on track to find home in several titles, which is good news for ATI, graphics product group of AMD.

Usually, any super-set of a DirectX release does not have a lot of chances to become popular among video game creators and publishers unless it is supported by all developers of graphics hardware. This happened to DirectX 8.1 and pixel shaders 1.4 in 2001, the same happened to shader models 2.0a and 2.0b of DirectX 9.0 in 2003/04, whereas the shader model 3.0 only became more or less wide-spread two years after its release and the launch of ATI Radeon X1000 lineup along with Microsoft Xbox 360 video game console.

The destiny of DirectX 10.1 seems to repeat the destinies of DirectX 8.1 and 9.0c: video game developers would hardly embrace a new application programming interface that is supported by only one independent hardware vendor (IHV) unless AMD supports them in some way. In fact, the first title that took advantage of DirectX 10.1 – Assassin’s Creed made by Ubisoft Montreal – quickly lost it after, as it is widely believed, Nvidia pressured the developer of this title that belongs to the company’s The Way It’s Meant to Be Played initiative... What is interesting to note in the particular case is that Nvidia will support DirectX 10.1 automatically once it launches DirectX 11-compatible graphics chip and will be able to take advantage of all the pros of the 10.1.

Fortunately for ATI, not all PC games belong to the aforementioned program and there are at least two coming in within the next six months to nine months that take advantage of DirectX 10.1: BattleForge developed by Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts as well as an unnamed title from Sega.

BattleForge by Phenomic EA is a fantasy online real-time strategy (watch the video here), which involves loads of battle units. Image quality in the game is truly impressive: all the units have high-quality geometry, terrain and vegetation look pretty realistic and special effects are remarkable. According to officials from Phenomic Studio, the BattleForge game runs about 30% faster on DX10.1 compared to DX10 thanks to lower amount of rendering passes needed (perhaps, not in all types of scenes). The game is set to emerge already this year, but the release date is unknown.

Little is known about the DirectX 10.1 game title set to be published by Sega in early 2009 and formally unveiled sometime in July, possibly at the E3 convention. According to Chris Southall, technical director of Sega Europe, the title will only have DirectX 10 and 10.1 rendering paths, hence, will not work on DirectX 9-compatible hardware and will not function under Windows XP operating system. What is the most important, the unnamed title is PC-exclusive. According to Sega, DirectX 10.1 allowed the developer to create its title “easier”, make it look “prettier” and make it work “faster”, though, no actual details were unveiled.

Obviously, two or three games cannot make an API truly successful/popular and there will be many months before DirectX 10.1 will truly be required to play games with high-quality effects and decent frame-rates. Nevertheless, the support of DirectX 10.1 is an indisputable advantage of ATI Radeon HD 3000 and HD 4000 series at the moment.