Introduction

World in Conflict

World in Conflict should ship in Oct

World in Conflict shot 3

Another screenshot from World in Conflict

Coming soon to a game near you: DirectX 10

If all goes according to plan, the DirectX 10 gaming era should be kicking off in a matter of months, if not slightly sooner. Upcoming games such as Crysis, Hellgate: London, and World in Conflict are all expected to debut later this year, while some of today’s existing games like Company of Heroes and Flight Simulator X are expected to be patched to take advantage of DX10. In fact, according to NVIDIA, the DX10 patch for Company of Heroes is expected to be released sometime next month.

Age of Conan DX10 shot

Age of Conan should also ship in Oct

Exactly how extensively these games will take advantage of DX10 is anyone’s guess at this point. As we’ve mentioned in the past, game developers could use DX10 to deliver performance optimizations, much like we saw with Far Cry 1.3 a few years back, where Crytek used shader model 2.0b and 3.0 to improve performance; or DX10 could be used by game devs to improve image quality. Far Cry is another excellent example of this, where shader model 3.0 was used to bring HDR lighting to GeForce, and later, Radeon X1K cards.

Crysis

Crysis looks sweet doesnt it?

Crysis ships in the second half of this year

It’s also possible that game devs could use DX10 to deliver both performance improvements and better image quality.

If you recall, we discussed this with Epic’s Tim Sweeney back in October in our DirectX 10 Preview: The Future of PC Graphics and Gaming article. In that article Tim said: “Unreal Engine 3 will make full use of DirectX 10, and many of our and our partners' games will ship in 2007 with full support for DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. But, despite the marketing hype, DirectX 10 isn't all that different from DirectX 9, so you'll mainly see performance benefits on DirectX 10 rather than striking visual differences.”

Based on that quote, it sounds like Epic’s early efforts will be focused more on improving performance thanks to DX10, rather than improving image quality (IQ). Of course, thanks to the improved performance provided by DX10, DX10 gamers could in theory then improve IQ by running at a higher AA level or screen resolution while still getting a good frame rate. The DX9 user would be forced to run at lower IQ settings. But visually in an Unreal Engine 3 game like Unreal Tournament 3 at least, it sounds like the game is going to look the same whether you’re running in DX9 or DX10, only the DX10 version will run a little faster.

The GeForce 8600: DX10 hardware for the masses

With DX10 games right around the corner, gamers looking to upgrade for these games haven’t had many options, particularly if you’re on a budget. The only real semi-inexpensive option up to this point has been the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, but with a $300 MSRP, it’s not exactly what many would call an economical upgrade. The real sweet spot of the mainstream segment is the $150-$200 price point.

To service this market, NVIDIA has developed a new line of GPUs: the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500, which are based on NVIDIA’s new G84 and G86 graphics cores. NVIDIA has incorporated many of the key technologies already found in GeForce 8800 into the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500, only they’ve been tweaked to be cheaper to produce. In fact, thanks to a tweaked video processing engine which offloads more fuctions, the new GPUs reduce CPU utilization for H.264 movies, allowing them to play back Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies without needing a high-end CPU.