Comments on: Square Enix DirectX 12 Tech Demo “Witch” Showcases Massive Leap in Polygon Rendering

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 04 May 2015 05:52:00 +0000

In reply to d0x360.

I hear u and agree. I kinda feel people r gasing themselves out, impatient, expecting CGI graphics asap. But, if we just calm down, take in some of the great looking games coming this year (Witcher!), we can have so much fun THIS YEAR. These new APIs are just being released, but it’s good to know we already have great games coming. It’ll take time man.

This will be my first Witcher, and it looks unbelievable. Not just the lighting thru trees, and the gorgeous shadows, but the combat seems to be twitch based, very fluid. Hopefully there’s minimal controller latency……..Dragon Age has a TON.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 04 May 2015 05:42:00 +0000

In reply to You Are Flat Out Wrong. Lol. I have an Xbox, but that ish is incredible, real time. Would u ACTUALLY BUY 4 DAM CARDS TO RUN THIS THO?!

By: You Are Flat Out Wrong

You Are Flat Out Wrong — Sat, 02 May 2015 15:22:00 +0000

PC’s shaming consoles yet again.

By: d0x360

d0x360 — Fri, 01 May 2015 23:56:00 +0000

We have been stuck in an odd place since the og Xbox. Ever increasing poly counts were great but to render good models with enough Poly’s meant no left over power to light, shade or texture them. So a workaround was devised and normal maps using pixel shaders were brought to gaming via pc and xbox. Normal mapping used shaders to make a low poly object looks like it was much higher resolution than it was. We still use that trick today because hardware could draw the massive number of polygons needed with effects.

Dx12 gets us past that hill we have been on for 15 years with a massive boost in draw calls and other tricks. Keep in mind that demo was running on 4 friggen titans and it was scripted so it wasn’t doing AI or a lot of physics or realtime lighting. However it shows potential. It shows where games could be 5 years from now if we continue seeing a new generation of GPU architecture every year on PC.

We are at a time of evolution. This means great things for movies as well. It will be cheaper to make virtual films of insane quality in real time. Just…don’t expect too much too fast. Games aren’t going to change overnight. We won’t see any meaningful results until 2016. We need engines and games written from day 1 to be based on DX12. No hacked in code and cross compatible nonsense. We MIGHT see that on upper end pc games in 2016. Might. Until then the only benefits will be small visual upgrades, simple things or maybe some slightly better frame rates from older hardware.