TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

The plot thickens....

"A story which just recently hit the web documents that NVIDIA's latest GPU, released earlier this week, the Geforce FX, may not support Microsoft's DirectX 9 feature set in full hardware.

The technique, or feature, in question, is displacement mapping. Microsoft iterate that displacement mapping is based on the N-Patch approach, introduced by ATI over a year ago. This obviously segregates it from the version NVIDIA implemented with the GeForce 3 GPU, i.e. RT-patches. This parametric surfaces solution was later disabled for the Geforce 3 cards as initially posed an operation which resulted in compatibility issues."

Read here for more.

Somehow, methinks that anything by NVIDIA will do just fine...

Well, it depends on what MS ( Matrox) and ATI does imo... If MS denies Nvidia DX9 certification ATI is sure to push this as much as they can...

This won't matter too much to the readers here/high-end users who read up on reviews etc., but to the average joe consumer, it'll probably make a difference when he's out shopping for a new card...
He'll (most likely) only notice that the Radeon 9700 is fully DX9, and the GF FX isn't... And considering it's MS who makes DX, then he'll stick with the card who's got DX support...


Personally I'm quite happy about this, as I'd like to see Displacement Mapping with Adaptive Tesselation becoming available in most cards, and used in games... And this is a step in the right direction if that is ever to happen
[EDIT]Though only a step as DX 9 only requires pre-sampled Displacement Mapping, and it can't be run with Adaptive Tesselation... But hopefully they'll require the whole shebang in DX10...[/EDIT]


.02$