Company of Heroes
DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 10 Rendering Modes
DirectX 9
DirectX 10
by Anton Shilov , Alexey Stepin
08/23/2007 | 11:03 AM
It’s the graphics factor that is mostly responsible for driving sales of video games for the PC. PC users are a conservative audience that has got used to the existing game genres while game publishers have limited opportunities to promote interest to new e-entertainment paradigms.
<%BANNER[article]%>There are hardcore gamers who spend most of their time playing best titles of all the genres. This audience can be targeted by visual realism and high quality of special effects, not even by the gameplay as such. And these gamers do not save on the hardware components of their PC systems. As a result, game developers and publishers take kindly to every technical innovation like advanced hardware physics processors, new GPUs or new APIs. One way or another, all of this has a positive effect on the sales volume.
On the other hand, PC users must be able to access those technical innovations for the introduction of them into games to be justifiable in the publisher’s eyes. For example, there are only few games that support Ageia PhysX processors which require a money investment on the user part. The same goes for modern graphics subsystems. No one is going to publish a game that can run normally only on newest and most advanced hardware because this makes the game inaccessible for the majority of users.
Anyway, every publisher and developer knows that all devoted gamers are going to obtain high-performance graphics cards sooner or later, so introducing new technologies is indeed reasonable. For example, the 2004 release Far Cry was at first recognized by enthusiasts only. This game enjoys certain popularity even to this day although back in 2004 only advanced PC configurations could run it at an acceptable speed and with maximum quality of visual effects.
Thus, every publisher and developer is interested in touting their project as featuring new technologies, high-quality visual effects, and exciting gameplay, but they are also interested in targeting their product at as broad an audience as possible.
Hardware developers are interested in selling as many of their products as they can, too, even though they often confess that the first generation of a new type of hardware solutions is mainly for software developers. So, they are interested in indirect advertisement of their new products by software developers and, consequently, in the introduction of newest technologies into games, too.
At the end of the last year and in the first half of 2007 the leading GPU developers – ATI as the graphics group within Advanced Micro Devices, and Nvidia – introduced their first generation of DirectX 10 compatible GPUs, Radeon HD 2000 and GeForce 8. Each company wants to sell as many new chips as they can and they do have the opportunity because a number of developers have announced formal support for DirectX 10 in their newest projects. The most anticipated project, Crysis from Crytek, is scheduled for release in November this year.
Crysis is not yet available even as a beta or demo version, so we can only make guesses at how beautiful and exciting the new game from the developer of Far Cry will be. However, there already exist games, namely Call of Juarez, Company of Heroes and Lost Planet, which are said to benefit from Microsoft’s new API.
In this article we’ll check out if the support for the new API in the mentioned games is a mere formality or the new games are indeed much better than the previous generation of game projects. We’ll also make sure if modern graphics cards can cope with the increased graphics load.
Originally released in 2006 as a DirectX 9 application, Call of Juarez is ready to acquire DirectX 10 support to improve its visual appeal and add new special effects.
To be specific, the demo version of Call of Juarez DX10 features the following improvements:
The list is short despite the considerably larger amount of work for the developer. The difference between the DirectX 9 and 10 implementations is noticeable to the eye, though.
After the release of the Call of Juarez DirectX 10 performance test Nvidia pointed at the developer’s not using the hardware resources efficiently, which led to lower speed of Nvidia’s GPUs that they could potentially provide. Particularly, Nvidia does not approve of the use of software FSAA resolve because the GeForce 8800 has hardware units for that purpose.
Released a year ago, Company of Heroes is popular among real-time strategists and is a heavy load even for most advanced graphics cards. The developer has made the graphics card’s job even harder by adding a few DirectX 10 effects, particularly:
Alas, this is rather a formal implementation of DirectX 10 based innovations. There is almost no visual difference between the DirectX 9 and 10 versions of the game, as you can see on the screenshots:
Company of Heroes | |
DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 10 Rendering Modes | |
DirectX 9 | DirectX 10 |
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Lost Planet was released for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 half a year ago and did not use the DirectX 10 API. However, the developer of this game - Capcom - and its publisher – Microsoft - decided to create a PC version of the game using DirectX 10.
Judging by users’ reports, the DirectX 9 version of Lost Planet is exactly alike to the DirectX 10 version visually and does not really boast high-quality graphics. It is rather an ordinary sci-fi 3D shooter with third-person view, not a breakthrough of any kind.
You should be aware that this test application was created with Nvidia’s support and some ATI Catalyst drivers are not fully compatible with Lost Planet. AMD has issued a press release saying that they were not given the opportunity to optimize drivers for this game and blaming the developer for the benchmark that could not show the true worth of the Radeon HD 2000 series.
Note also that Lost Planet does not allow you to play if the frame rate is lower than 25fps. From the gamer’s point of view, there is no difference between 24fps and 14fps because the game will shut down in either case.
To test the performance of ATI Radeon HD 2000 and Nvidia GeForce 8 graphics card families in DirectX 10 applications we assembled the following standard test platform:
Since we believe that the use of texture filtering optimizations is not justified in this case, the AMD and Nvidia graphics card drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of tri-linear and anisotropic texture filtering. We have also enabled transparent texture filtering to achieve best image quality by selecting Transparency antialiasing in multisampling mode. As a result, our settings looked as follows:
Although the new DirectX 10 API should first of all improve the image quality, we decided to test all graphics cards in several image quality modes with or without FSAA depending on the type of the graphics accelerator and its features. The games configuration files weren’t modified in any way. We enabled all options from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare driver settings.
We performed tests in 1280x1024/960, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 resolutions with enabled anisotropic filtering, except combinations of some graphics cards, resolutions and/or modes which caused problems.
The list below shows the three test modes for the games we used:
Call of
Mode 1:
Mode 2:
Mode 3:
Company of Heroes
Mode 1:
Mode 2:
Mode 3:
Lost Planet
Mode 1:
Mode 2:
Mode 3:
This class includes the following graphics cards with a recommended price of $349 and higher:
None of the included graphics cards shows a speed of higher than 28fps, so we can’t say that any of currently available graphics cards can run Call of Juarez DX10 with high graphics quality settings at a really high speed. Note that the Radeon HD 2900 XT can challenge the much more expensive GeForce 8800 GTX.
When the resolution of shadow maps is reduced to 1024x1024 and when the “normal” level of shadow quality is selected, the speed grows up, but not too much. The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is still competitive against the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX but you can’t name the winner because the minimum speed of 16fps and lower is practically useless.
Like with the DirectX 9 version of the game, you can’t normally turn FSAA on in the DirectX 10 version, so we benchmarked the cards without FSAA.
The DirectX 10 version being much alike to the DirectX 9 original, all of the graphics cards, except for the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS, deliver acceptable performance in it.
Here, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is an obvious winner, but considering that the game itself differs much from the integrated performance test, we can assume that the GeForce 8800 from Nvidia is capable of ensuring a comfortable frame rate as well.
Lowering the quality settings from Maximum to High/Medium, we can see a considerable performance growth for each graphics card from both ATI and Nvidia.
The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB GDDR4 still enjoys an impressive lead over the others in terms of minimum frame rate. It amounts to 100% in comparison with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX in the first test mode and increases to 200% in the second test mode.
We used two demos to test Lost Planet because the GPU load is different in both of them. Unfortunately, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards could not activate FSAA in this game and generated visual artifacts (that we didn’t see on other ATI Radeon HD 2000 solutions), which is an indication of a flaw in the driver or in the Lost Planet demo.
Well, the speed is too low at the maximum graphics quality settings even with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, which is an indisputable leader. The game will shut down automatically because of the too low speed.
When the graphics quality is set at Medium/High, the GeForce 8800 and the Radeon HD 2900 XT accelerate. AMD’s solutions are still behind Nvidia’s products, probably due to the lack of application-specific optimizations in the ATI Catalyst driver.
Note that all the cards, except for the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB, have a somewhat higher speed on the Cave map than on the Snow map. We don’t know the reason for that. Note also that the highest playable resolution on the GeForce 8800 GTX is only 1280x960 pixels.
Every card speeds up after we reduce the quality of visual effects, but the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB is still a loser whereas its 1GB mate can challenge the GeForce 8800 GTX even. The latter card can show a good speed with enabled FSAA.
The following graphics cards, with a recommended price of $149 and higher, belong with this class:
These graphics cards are not for enthusiasts so we benchmarked their performance without FSAA, limiting ourselves to the maximum level of anisotropic filtering. We also added another test mode, with minimum graphics quality settings.
Being in fact one third and one fourth of their top-end mates, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 and the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS deliver appropriate speeds, which are too low for playing the DirectX 10 version of Call of Juarez on these cards.
Note that the Radeon HD 2600 XT offers two times the speed of the more expensive GeForce 8600 GTS in this test. It may be a lucky accident or an indication of better performance of the AMD card in DirectX 10 applications. We’ll check this out in the other tests.
The AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT and the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS both have very low results at high graphics quality settings. But as soon as you reduce the graphics quality settings to the minimum, which makes the game look more like DirectX 8 than a DirectX 10 application, the frame rate becomes acceptably high.
As in the previous case, the Radeon HD 2600 XT outperforms the GeForce 8600 GTS at any graphics quality settings. On the other hand, the Radeon provides a playable frame rate in a resolution of 1280x1024 only.
The Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS refused to run this game at the highest graphics quality settings even in demo mode but this is not a great disappointment since the speed of DirectX 10 rendering is low on both cards.
The Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS is considerably faster than the Radeon HD 2600 XT on the Snow map, yet this has no practical worth since the game is going to shut down as soon as the frame rate sinks below the minimum level.
The Cave map doesn’t tell us anything new about these graphics cards except that they deliver somewhat higher speeds here.
This class includes graphics cards with a recommended price of $79 and higher:
These graphics cards are targeted at casual gamers, so we benchmarked their performance without FSAA, limiting ourselves to the maximum level of anisotropic filtering. We used three test modes: with maximum, average and minimum graphics quality.
The test results show clearly that modern entry-level DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards are only good for slideshows, not for real gaming.
We can see that the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT is somewhat faster than its more expensive component in the DirectX 10 version of Call of Juarez.
The Company of Heroes DX10 results look depressing as well.
Although the Radeon HD 2400 XT is in the lead, its 18fps won’t do for playing this game normally.
Like the GeForce 8600, the GeForce 8500 GT cannot run Lost Planet at the max graphics quality settings.
With a frame rate from 2 to 9fps, the Snow map looks like a sequence of pictures of a wintry sci-fi landscape rather than like an interactive 3D game.
The ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT and Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT cannot avoid the title of the most retarded DirectX 10 compatibles even on the easier-to-render Cave map.
Summing everything up, we have to say that the support of DirectX 10 in both software and hardware is in fact merely nominal.
None of the tested games can boast much higher visual quality in comparison with the DirectX 9 applications while the use of DirectX 10 lowers the frame rate. We guess the only lucky example of a DirectX 10 game is Call of Juarez DX10, but largely due to its initially beautiful DirectX 9 visuals.
Using a wide range of test modes we could not achieve a high frame rate at high quality of game visuals, so we don’t think the speed will be acceptable even at the lowest settings.
Talking about the tested graphics cards, we can note the following:
But if you decide to buy a DirectX 10 card today realizing that you’ll need another 3D card to play games scheduled for 2008, this test session has shown that:
GPU developers have made a point of releasing two product families based on the same graphics architecture to guarantee a lifecycle of 1-2 years since the announcement. If this trend continues, we’ll see new series of DirectX 10 graphics cards from the leading developers this fall. However, these new series won’t differ much from the current ones architecturally, and so we don’t expect them to bring about any performance breakthroughs