Dirt 2 DX11 Q&A with Developers


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http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,695889/...-features/News/

Teaser: just small teaser of the 1 page article click the link above for the rest

PCGH: The second version of the Ego Engine did already scale very well with dual- and multi-core processors. Have you nevertheless managed to improve this with the third generation? Up to how many cores are currently supported? What modules/tasks/systems can be parallelized to run in separate threads?

Bryan Marshall: Yes, we've continued to work with the hardware providers to improve our multi-core capabilities. We're still doing our benchmark tests but we're getting some really good improvements on moving from 2 core to 4 core systems (8 threads). A good example of the type of work we thread out is the physics solver.

PCGH: It was announced that Dirt 2 will support the DX11 API that comes with Windows 7:

? What is the deciding technical advantages of the DX11 API/Shader Modell 5?

? In what way does it allow you to optimize or simplify the rendering process in DiRT2?

? Do you use DX11-Multithreading to lighten the load on the CPU?

? In what way will the DX 11 visualization differ from the graphics that are rendered with DX 10(.1) hardware or will DX11 just speed up the rendering process in DiRT2?

? What are the graphical features that can only be rendered with Shader Model 5 hardware?

Bryan Marshall: The DX11 version is a great place to showpiece DiRT2 and show that Codemasters' technology is at the forefront of PC gaming. We think there are 3 big ticket items in DX11: Hardware Tessellation, Direct Compute 11 (Compute Shaders) and the multi-threading of the command pipeline.

So Tessellation allows us to add a lot more detail to objects such the crowds, water surfaces and moving cloth. Up to this point hardware tessellation was difficult to achieve efficiently with all the other demands going on. Direct Compute 11 allows us to really push up the fidelity of our post-processing solution, giving a higher resolution to some of the effects such as motion blur. Finally the multi-threaded capabilities have made us think a lot about our rendering pipeline and how we can optimize this. That's not easy to get right and I think that will be one of the big challenges for developers in the next few years. Of course DX11 comes with amazing new video cards that allow all this to run faster to begin with!

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