AMD/ATI Tempts Game Developers with DirectX 10.1
Written on July 1, 2008 – 7:07 pm | by admin
With a market position resurrection in progress, AMD/ATI look to compete using a tried and tested tool for technological supremacy over its rival(s), developer-level optimizations for their games. Blizzard has been looking at implementing DirectX 10.1 with its future games. If that happens, it becomes a favorable scenario for AMD’s products since Blizzard aren’t habituated to making games that run best on only the most expensive hardware, but that with DirectX 10.1, they will look to implement certain DX10.1-exclusive effects, which means that even mid-range users of ATI products could enjoy the best visuals that the game has to offer, something NVIDIA and its users could miss out on.
It is learned that AMD is looking to team up with developers for implementation of the DirectX 10.1 features. An ‘old friend’ of ATI, Valve could just have DirectX 10.1 implemented with ATI apparently making sure that happens. The next major revision of the Source engine that drives upcoming game titles such as Half Life 2: Episode 3, Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead could just be DirectX 10.1 titles looking at the flexibility of the Source engine and the ease with which new technologies could be incorporated into it.
Game developers have a tendency to play it safe though, and whether there will be any exclusive effects or not remains to be seen. There is no reason as to for why they shouldn’t implement DirectX 10.1 though, the worst-case-scenario is that people with compliant hardware will get a performance boost where DX10.1 makes a difference over DX10.0. On the surface, DirectX 10.1 is touted to be more of a feature upgrade than performance.
Tags: amd, ati, directx, directx 10.1, nvidia