Items tagged with DX9
When it comes to Star Wars, the gaming industry has a long history of cranking out titles of uncertain quality. For every brilliant title like Knights of the Old Republic, we've seen several clunkers (Kinect Star Wars anyone) and a few outright failures like Republic Heroes. LucasArts demonstrated a new Star Wars game at E3 this week -- Star Wars: 1313 -- and despite the brand's uneven history, we're cautiously optimistic. The 1313 moniker refers to a specific level of Coruscant that's a haven for criminals, bounty hunters, and crime lords. You take on the role of a bounty hunter looking for information on an unspecified criminal conspiracy who descends to 1313 in search of data. This will be...
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Battlefield 3 has become something of a hot item in recent months thanks to the game's incredible visuals and gameplay videos that have left long-time fans of the series salivating. BF3 is the sequel to Battlefield 2 (released back in 2005), and while it's designed for XBox 360, PS3, and PC, the game was built around the PC platform, somewhat of a rarity in the modern age of console-dominated sales. In this video, GeForce.com's Kris Rey sits down to have a chat with DICE producer Patrick Liu. The Frostbite 2 engine that BF3 uses was designed for the title and, according to Liu, includes a number of improvements. "“We added a ton of stuff – we basically rewrote the rendering engine...
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In terms of technology, DirectX 11 isn't the API defining, behind-the-scenes reboot that DirectX 10 was. It's an incremental update, much in the same way that Windows 7 is an update of Vista. At the end of the day, DirectX 11 is basically just DirectX 10 with a bunch of new features stuck on. However, we'd speculate that DirectX 11 should have a much larger impact on the end-user experience than DirectX 10 did because it brings several new features to the table that will make creating advanced graphical effects seldom seen in past games, much easier. Some critics have said that Windows 7 is everything that Vista was supposed to be. But is DirectX 11 everything DirectX 10 was hyped up to be? We...
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Touted as one of the biggest milestones in Windows games development in recent years, DirectX 10 ultimately didn't live up to the hype as far as end-users were concerned. A large part of the disappointment was perhaps due to a misunderstanding of what DirectX 10 was supposed to be. DirectX 10 was a fundamental refresh of the entire API and it brought a much-needed reboot to an aging API model. The reboot removed a lot of the legacy clutter left over from over a decade of previous DirectX developments. DirectX 10 was never really about the end users at all, it was really about the developers. It also didn't help that DirectX 10 was tied to Windows Vista, which was unpopular with gamers from launch....
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The PC Demo for Codemaster's upcoming DirectX 11 racing title Dirt 2 has just hit the web and is available for download right here. If you're unfamiliar with Dirt 2, Codemaster's says this about the game, "DiRT 2 will feature a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to the most diverse and challenging real-world environments. This World Tour will have players competing in aggressive multi-car and intense solo races at extraordinary new locations, from canyon racing and jungle trails to city stadium-based events." To sum this up in gamer-speak, Dirt 2 is a highly anticipated racing sim, that happens to feature some incredible graphics. Throughout the later part of...
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After years of delays (including one cancelation), developer change-ups, and a lot of hard work, Terminal Reality succeeded in bringing a Ghostbusters game to market for the PS3, XBox 360, Wii, and PC. Terminal Reality committed to building their own graphics engine—dubbed the Infernal Engine—to facilitate game development; we recently had a chance talk with them about the game, the new engine, and the future of multi-core gaming. The questions listed below were answered by Mark Randel, President and Founder and Joe Kreiner, VP of Sales and Marketing... Ghostbusters Game Trailer HotHardware: Implementing effective multi-core support in a video game has historically been a challenge,...
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Mac users represent a small percentage of computer users--about three percent worldwide. But if Mac sales are any indication--up 51 percent in the last year--the number of Mac users are growing rapidly. One of the reasons for this is that all new Macs can also run Windows, allowing users to have access to both operating systems simultaneously via virtualization software.There are several options available for those who want to run Windows on their Macs. Apple's Boot Camp software, which comes with OS X 10.5 (Leopard), sets up a Windows partition so the system can boot directly into the native Windows OS. This way offers the highest level of Windows compatibility and performance, but precludes...
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Yesterday, Capcom released two demo versions of their upcoming game Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. One version is designed for DirectX 9-classs graphics cards and the other for newer DirectX 10-class cards like those in NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series and ATI's Radeon HD 2000 series of products. There has been a bit of a buzz surrounding the release of this demo, not only because it is the first that uses DirectX 10, but because it currently works poorly on DX10 ATI hardware. The situation with ATI's hardware and this demo will likely be worked out with future driver releases over time, however, so we're not going to dwell on that here. Instead, what we want to explore is whether or not there is...
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Fudo sends word that the industry will soon have a new DX9 benchmark that is based off of a boat racing game. Should the genre not excite you, the technical details surely will. Called RyderMark 2006 and based off a multithreaded Sahara game engine, we find support for Parallax Occlusion Mapping, 64-bit High Dynamic Range lighting with Anti-Aliasing, Shader Model 2.0 and 3.0, plus more. Being based off of an actual game, we should be able to put more faith in this benchmark than many of the synthetic benchmarks which are commonly used today. WE HEAR that one anonymous company is developing a game and a benchmark based on a boat-racing story...
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