How will DX10 change our jobs?

Snowfly

Anything additional to learn on the content creation side, or is it going to be shaders, shaders, shaders? Are more artists going to start learning to program shaders? Could be that we do everything the way we do now, and let the tech take realtime rendering closer to pre-rendered...

-edited out that article cos it was distracting from the point of this post-

rooster

lets not be too hasty, read the notice at the bottom of the article . The photoreal water is.. photo. Its a good topic though

CrazyButcher

dont let the hype/pr fool you, dx10 is not revolutionary different (internally more than to the outside), also the marketshare of dx10 cards + vista, just is too small to be worth a lot. We just have reached the point where dx9/sm2 is mainstream, and still, the most visible difference in games we get is post-process fx. PS3/360 have sm3 hardware, wii even less, that is what the market dictates.

the whole dx10 thingie is mostly pure pr to push vista

Snowfly

Yeah that damn red bordered pink box. But I did say "potential" ...Just looking at the trends over the years that every new generation of DX brings with a new set of skills to pick up on, so yeah I'm not focused on the hype...couldn't care less actually, but I do want to keep my skillset marketable.

Tumerboy

I remember when the Conan DX10 screenshots were released. My computer couldn't even load screenshots of DX10. . . it does not bode well.

Toomas

Its pretty much just a standard, that dictates what features harware must have to compatible. And they claim it has improved driver arhitecture (well vista has or whatever).
Anyways i dont know any groundbreaking features it has over DX9.

Slum

But.. look at all the things we can do with DX10!

Here's an dirty little unimpressive DX9 fish:



And here is the true testament of DX10's mastery. The same fish rendered with DX10!



DX10 is the wave of the future, my friends! No longer do our hideous retarded fish have to have little bumps. Using the true power of DX10, we can make their bumps into spikes.

rebb

I like the Shader that turns Fat Men with Cactii into floating Heads. Awesome !

jgarland

Aside from the fact that that comparison was a healthy load of horse shit, I honestly don't see DirectX 10 changing the way we work much at all. Shaders will be improved, of course, system resources will be better utilized, and what have you, but it doesn't truly detract from the fact that we're artists, and that's something that computers will never be. We'll be pushing polygons and painting textures for a long time to come, so I don't believe you really need to worry.

Look at the games currently in development. They're all using Direct X 10, and have been for a good while now. This is the extent to which the industry is going to "change," for this generation of Direct X at least.

Ruz

will directx 50 have real dinosaurs?

James Edwards

Ruz: that would create a time paradox I'm pretty sure. Then we'd all be fucked - except for anyone who worked on Turok. They'd have all the cheats.

NeoShroomish

[ QUOTE ]
But.. look at all the things we can do with DX10!

Here's an dirty little unimpressive DX9 fish:

[image]pix[/image]

And here is the true testament of DX10's mastery. The same fish rendered with DX10!

[image]moar pix[/image]

DX10 is the wave of the future, my friends! No longer do our hideous retarded fish have to have little bumps. Using the true power of DX10, we can make their bumps into spikes.

[/ QUOTE ]
I think I do recall reading about real time sud-division in DX10, which would allow for silhouette changes when using bump/parallax maps. Awesome.

Xaltar

DX10 can't do anything that GL can't as far as I have been told buy our lead coder. DX10 is implimenting features now that have been available in GL for years although never used due to system performance issues in the past.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Neo_God

That may be true Xaltar. I mean, Look at what id has pumped out with their new engine, which is all GL.

Keg

If I recall correctly the big thing with dx10 cards is that there are no longer parts of the gpu that does only vertex or only pixel processing. Everything is now general use so the card can use all pipelines for any process, thus improving efficiency.

Tis can't so I am not 100% so forgive me if I am wrong.

Ruz

Gwot- there are a few dinosaurs in the game industry.perhaps I am one of them now:)
Actually I quite enjoyed turok

CrazyButcher

GL features an extension system, that allows hardware vendors to add new stuff themselves. This is great to get new features to play with, but not so good if ati/nvidia end up doing similar with different extensions, or that certain features arent wide-spread supported. Especially when it came to rendering-to-texture effects, the first pixel/vetex shaders, GL had a bigger gap to d3d for some time, which dx9 was simply superior in ease of use.

MS setting standards that all have to follow, there "shader model" system and all that, makes it a bit more friendly for developers. GL is very open and doesnt really have that much standards. Whats worse is that it is legal in GL to just "do it", even when its not supported in hardware (aka software-fallbacks). So depending on the mix of setup you ask for (floating point textures whatever) the driver might fall back to seconds-per-frame.

To my knowledge the dx10 driver system is more like GL, which is more lightweight and faster. On the other side GL is just redoing the API to be more for current days system, a bit more like d3d.

While its true that in GL new stuff (geometry shaders are the major new thing with sm4 cards) can be done now already and on all OS, GL suffers from that extension jungle, and driver issues (most focus on dx, hence GL drivers often are a bit more buggy, and when you aren't id you cannot expect nvi/ati to fix them for you). Also stuff like .fx or compiled shaders and so on, which are "hot" for game stuff, simply don't exist, yet.

id could and eventually has done the engine for dx (360 variant) as well, so I wouldnt say it's GL, after all the hardware it's supposed to run on has a common feature set + both apis expose those. I'd say id simply picked GL as their main api, cause they have most experience with it, so why change...

personally I enjoy GL, too, its flexibility and expecially light-weightness, but it wasn't until soon when the newer stuff became easier/more robust/widespread to use.

everything comes at a certain price, so GLs extendability thru vendors, is great to play with new stuff quick, but has the issue of having less standardized ways of doing stuff. the world is grey...

Keg: that is true for dx10 generation cards, but isnt api related, just was a matter of time/featureset. The xbox360 (using a dx9 variant) also offered the unified shaders. It's not mandatory how an architecture implements stuff, so it can still be done thru separate pixel/vertex chips, but as you said, the unified approach is more efficient.

East

CrazyButcher, very good overview of the situation. Thanks

snap.crackle.pop

[ QUOTE ]
But.. look at all the things we can do with DX10!

Here's an dirty little unimpressive DX9 fish:



And here is the true testament of DX10's mastery. The same fish rendered with DX10!



DX10 is the wave of the future, my friends! No longer do our hideous retarded fish have to have little bumps. Using the true power of DX10, we can make their bumps into spikes.

[/ QUOTE ]


This one made it for me, for a sec all i was thinking was "woohaa ! im looking at the true power of DX10", before i realized it was a joke XD bhahahahaha !!

dejawolf

whoo, nice DX9 parallax mapping on the DX10 fish.
or is that a heightmap.. lol.

sebas

How will DX10 change our jobs? I suppose this say it all...

DirectX 10:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/9019.html
DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 10:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/19966.html
What interest us?:
http://media.pc.ign.com/media/694/694190/img_3493897.html

Asthane

[ QUOTE ]
How will DX10 change our jobs? I suppose this say it all...

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, apparantly rendering with DX10 means you automatically get more explosions and physics!