DX9 vs. DX10 with Lost Planet
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 any real advantage to running the DirectX 10 version of this game over DirectX 9.
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The screenshots above were taken with the DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 versions of the Lost Planet demo running on GeForce 8800 GTX using the latest Windows Vista drivers available from NVIDIA. The game was configured for a resolution of 1280x720, with 8X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled. If you flip through the screenshots and compare the two versions, you'll see that visually they don't differ very much at all. The motion blur effect is more pronounced in the DX10 shots and it gives the game a more realistic look that's not conveyed well over still captures. Other than that, those of you with DX9-class video cards really aren't missing out on much, if anything at all with this title. In addition to the visual similarities between the two version, also look at the framerates reported in each scene. As you'll see, the DX10 version performs far worse than the DX9 version. It's so much worse, that we're sure many of you would trade off the slight visual advances of the DX10 version for the much smoother framerates of DX9.
Of course, DX10 games are in their infancy at the moment and its going to take some more time for game developers to fully exploit the API and produce games with much better visuals than DX9. It seems that time just hasn't come yet.
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