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AMD shows first DX11 hardware
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 | Permalink

Some reading about it:
PC Perspective
VR-Zone
Fudzilla

And a youtube video:
AMD demonstrates tessellation on the worlds first DirectX 11 graphics processor

It's nice to see some real DX11 hardware. So I guess this settles a release date this fall. No hints on performance yet though. The question is if the chip that was demonstrated is the high-end offering or mid-range. The chip appears to be quite small, supposedly only 180mm2.

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Michael
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

meh - not exactly earth shattering. Without knowing the hardware involved (both CPU and GPU), it's just another tessellation demo...

Overlord
Wednesday, June 10, 2009

True, DX11 and tessellation isn't some magic new cool thing everybody instantly needs.
It takes times for these things to become widely used, so the real question is, whats the real performance of the card in comparison with the GT300 which comes just a few months(weeks even) after this one.

FMoreira
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Yes, but tessellation is not the only new feature in DirectX 11.
What about Multi-Threaded Rendering?
I my opinion that will be one of the great features! Not only for games but also for scientific visualization
And remember that Multi-Threaded Rendering and Tessellation, are just two among others...

Overlord
Thursday, June 11, 2009

I wouldn't bet money on it, Graphics is one of the most parallel things you can do so in the end your still competing for the same resources, but sure it's nice to be able to render from different threads, but in the end it's all the same.
Most new features in DX11 is mainly an update for the API and not the actual rendering process.
The only real "hardware" update is tessellation, while undeniably nice, it's nothing that can't be done with openGL, or Nvidia hardware (and i do think all g80 and above hardware can support DX11, though maybe not as efficiently).
The main point is that all features aside, performance is still key.

Fmoreira
Friday, June 12, 2009

Yes, the big problem tree of Graphics Hardware/Programming always has a root called Performance.
But somewhere connected to that root there's a node called Developers And is here where, probably, DirectX 11 makes more sense.
Probably the final user only pays attention to the Performance stuff, but the Programmer, the Designer and the Modeler has a wider set o "things" to consider.

" (and i do think all g80 and above hardware can support DX11, though maybe not as efficiently) "
DirectX11 introduces some more pipeline stages. As you say maybe it's possible, but they would need to emulate, through software, to accomplish the same things ( I think... ).

Anyway, I hope that soon we all can get a DX11 card and take the discussion to the next level