AMD's DX10 is not up to scratch

Yeah the only added visuals I see are multiple lightsources for shadows (ie muzzleflashes can cast shadows) and this "feature" that I believe they called procedural generation that adds some random scenery to all maps without them having to modify them. The only scenery I've seen added are some ugly grass and flowers along with some random objects like barrels and wheelbarrows. Not hardly worth the huge performance hit.

I will say that NVIDIA's latest driver, 162.15, is probably one of the best drivers for Vista yet even though it got pulled from their website for alleged "issues" (I haven't come across any). Some games now are actually running just as fast on Vista as XP. Of course the majority of games still more than likely have a decrease in framerate. But the gap is narrowing.

My own benchmarks running 162.15

Company of Heroes DX9
1280x1024
Highest AA setting
XP - 57.0 fps
Vista - 58.1 fps
Vista DX10 - 25.1 fps :P

Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
1280x1024
Highest AA and filtering setting
XP - 157.49 fps
Vista 32-bit - 155.68 fps
Vista 64-bit - 109.53 (wow don't run this in 64-bit! add the -32bit command line)

The largest difference was
Counter-Strike Source
1280x1024
Highest AA and filtering setting
XP - 188.36
Vista - 178.24

But they are both so high that it really doesn't make much of a difference

I really think the drivers just need time to mature and Vista will be almost exactly the same in terms of performance. I'm quite surprised.

ATI at present time has no solid drivers , the other thing is that R600 lacks the textures processing power, NVIDIA's drivers are far better coded , also no every developer whant's to make shaders very complex (ATI uses more of complex shaders NVIDIA uses less complex shaders and it has faster shader clock ) . Another big thing is that most of game developers are using old egnines and they apply the DX10 code patch to that old engines. For example the Company of Heroes engine was used it old school title like Ground Control 1 , Homeworld 1, Homeworld 2. So we have a DX7 engine that was patched to DX8 then to DX9,b and c, and now it has some DirectX 10 code embedded. So the big question is "How the new games designed and coded on DX9 and later patched to DX10, or pure DX10 witch will not happen soon , will run on current DX10 hardware " : ]

Originally posted by Cameraman@Jun 27 2007, 07:33 PM
it got pulled from their website for alleged "issues" (I haven't come across any).

you haven't got any problems because you didn't played OpenGL based games (that driver has no stable OpenGL driver ) and it crashes on "Lost Planet : Extreme condition" Demo and Retail version od DX10 path. :]

Nope it works with the retail version, it just doesn't work with the demo. No troubles with OpenGL here either.

163.11 is now out and from what I'm hearing Company of Heroes gets approximately a 25% boost in framerate in DX10 mode. It's still nowhere near DX9's framerate, but it's an improvement.

Originally posted by Cameraman@Jun 27 2007, 04:50 PM
Yeah true. I don't know why relic bothered with this dx10 patch though. I was able to max the game out with aa and filtering and still have an average framerate in the 100s. Just by switching it to dx10 and having all AA and filtering disabled, the framerate is in the pits. Yeah, I just got Vista But I still have XP dual booted :francesco:

Patches are actually a good point. For a lot of games that don't come out working to 100% on DX10, I think a patch would probably optimize the usage of the game.

Originally posted by PBond12@Jul 11 2007, 08:39 PM
Patches are actually a good point. For a lot of games that don't come out working to 100% on DX10, I think a patch would probably optimize the usage of the game.

But this patch is a nonsense , Company of Heroes is based on an engine witch was used in titles such as : Homeworld 1, Homeworld 2,Ground Control 1 and 2, Warhammer40K Dawn of War, lets sum it all up, Ground Control 1 was in the DirectX 7 years, i played back then on my Celeron400 @ 600Mhz and 256mb of ram and RivaTNT2 ;] . So now after all those years we get a DirectX 7 engine witch was updated to DirectX 8, 8,1 and 9 and now to DX10. All those "upgrades" where done for each new game , but now it was different they introduced the DX9 version of the game and patched it in a hurry to DX10, surely it was a bold move but the performance suffers a lot. I played the Lost Planet : Extreme Condition demo on my 8800GTS and it played well but sometimes it dropped to about 25fps and bounced back again @ stable 70 , 1 month later i played a Full Retail version of the same game and it was running almost the same ;] but the dip's into the 25fps zone where not so often , it seems that not the CAPCOM developers made the game so "smooth" but the NVIDIA engineers did the job. So to sum it all up, Relic developers patched an old engine to DX10 , they didn't even bother to optimise it , and all the blame goes to the DAAMIT and NVIDIA becuase they made so "crappy hardware" , NVIDIA's engineers are working on 3 fronts right now, they have the Windows XP DirectX9 driver model, Vista DX9 driver model and DX10 Driver model, not to mention the 64bit versions of the O/S's. Give the engineers some time and they will try to make it best that is available, just look at the not so good past GeforceFX series , they sucked at first at games but where good with benchmarks , the roles have changed once the NV released 50.XX Detonator driver series , i remember that i had GeForce4Ti 4200 Back then ,before the 50.xx driver series i had a good performance but when the 50's came i had superior performance , and the FX series had also a good boost in games , so you see that the engineers sometimes don't have the time to release a good driver because the 6 months development process of the new chips is faster then the development of the drivers ;]