DirectX suffered a bit of a setback with DirectX10, being inextricably linked with an unpopular operating system (Windows Vista) and requiring significant investment of resources from developers due to the new API. With Windows 7, we got DirectX11 which seems to fulfill many of the hopes that DirectX10 never met, but does it live up to the hype? HotHardware runs it through some tests and writes up “The State of DirectX11”.
We’ve tested five of the earliest available DirectX 11 titles and we’re happy to report that the situation this time around is looking quite favorable for early adopters. While we observed performance hits when switching to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9 in all five games, we also observed a noticeable corresponding image quality improvement. The drop in performance for DirectX 11 in our tests can be attributed to the added image quality. Effects like tessellation, screen-space ambient occlusion, advanced post processing and DX11 exclusive anti-aliasing in some games brought the performance down in our testing, but they also boosted image quality.
The State of DirectX 11 – Image Quality & Performance – HotHardware.
