The screenshot in the first post is not DX11. Its heavily modded Crysis (the first game) which I dont think even supported DX11, it was a DX9 game that could run in DX10. You dont need DX11 for high resolution textures and good lighting.

Those screenshots just show how great a game can look without DX11.

Not being funny but Skyrim should look nearly as good as thoughs screenshots (on PC) imo ....Oh i'm so greedy"

i never cared about directx 11, until i got a windows 7, now i can clearly see the diference, better lightining, better water , better particles, tessalation (make texture look even more 3d) I have no idea if they are going to put it in game or not, but if they do it is going to be AWESOME, imagine walking in markath at night, with full dinamic light and full tesselation! YEAAS!@#$


I SAW the diference in the game stalker, with directx 11 the game looks incredibly realistic, by the way, i really recoment this game ^^

Yes..i have imagined Skyrim to have DX11 goodness. I was honestly gutted when i heard the words...Not supporting DX11,apart from performance gains??? Why should it look the same as the Xbox? Why not make it look as good as it can for each platform?????

WHAAAT NOOO DIRECTX 11??? damnit! i just hope they dont do the same thing they did with oblivion, they just took out some of the graphical stuff (like everything having shadows) so it could run smoothly on the xbox360, i dont blame them though, the most people play the game the best, but i would hate if they did it again...

THIS! and the game is a console port so keep the expectation low kids.

Unfortunately, when your benchmark hardware is restricted to DirectX 9, it's a bit of a tall order for a developer who has decided since Oblivion that they are going to put the consoles first to expand on feature-sets only available to the PC user.

But I really am going to be mad if gamesas don't at least give it an attempt for the lighting.

Actually all those shots are from the first Crysis, which came out 5 years ago.

That is an actual screenshot of an actual game?

It's from Crysis. Kind of embarrassing as it came out around the same time as Oblivion lol.. though to be fair that particular screenshot has a bunch of graphics mods applied.. but still.

As Direct X any version is core code level, the odds of successfully hacking features onto the game kernel are slim and none.

I'm hoping that they are at least putting the code hooks in to allow later development of a replacement executable. Otherwise, this is model they are working from:

Let's build a game for 5 year old out of date hardware, knowing that new hardware is still at least 2 years away, concentrating on the platforms that are utterly non upgradeable and obsolesent heading towards antique, while depriving the section of the community that can actually showcase our technical skill (and is responsible for the true longevity of the particular title) of any advanced features. Knowing that one or more of those 'new platforms' may introduce code or design concepts that totally prevent the game from playing in any acceptable way on Platform whatever. Which would utterly leave the game's longevity at the mercy of the section of the community that we blew off with an attitude of 'you are not important enough'.

That may not be the attitude prevalent at BGS, but the simple truth is that in statements and tone of communications, that is what it -reads and sounds- like at times.

There are many good technical reasons why implementing DX-11 level coding would be a very good thing. First and foremost, I personally get tired of everyone waiting for the bloody shooters to try new tech before -they- consider it. There are many descriptive adjectives I can use to describe that behavior, but let's not get banned. Daggerfall was the odd child because it, a lowly CRPG, took that tech envelope and stretched it beyond a lot of what the shooters were capable of doing. In 1996. And in 2011, people =STILL= play that old DOS game and love it. That kind of loyalty is priceless in any endeavour, and worth far more than any monetary cost to achieve it, as word of mouth beats and trumps the slickest ad campaign ever devised.

Shader Model 5 is superior to the previous versions. Better water, terrain, color control, blending, mapping with normal maps, bump maps, light maps, shadow maps, etc. All the little tricks that are used to speed up game renderers. Then you get into things like the Compute shader, that let's you use your GPU as secondary processing power for your system. That would let you have a scaleable physics setup for example; a simplified one for weaker systems, and added features for the capable (ragdoll vs. collision accurate).

Tesselation. Here's a good example; dragon wings. Model the wings with accurate boning, then make the membrane low poly (like say 3-6 per section). Have the tesselator push that to a few thousand each section. At runtime, and solely in the video card environment. All your computer sees is the low poly wings it has in its memory,,,,,,leaving all that room for other things there. Drive the tesselated wings with an animated displacement map, and you get softbody like behavior without the penalty dynamic softbody calcs inflict. The amount of memory it will free from polygon heavy modeling is....shall we say....significant?

Far better lighting models supported.....up to HDRI.
DX-11 cards universally have much wider processing pipelines than DX-9 hardware, meaning more room to offload CPU based effects and modes onto the GPU without inflicting slowdowns.

Unless someone deliberately goes low end, any new computer is at least a dual core, most quad. That kind of power is still mostly untapped, as it has to be designed in from the get go.

I hope we get surprised.......but I fear we shall not be........

Crysis modded blows away all games, and it is 5 years old.

Oblivion with all the graphics mods applied looks OK as well, vanilla Crysis didn't look like those shots.

So, realistically, Skyrim modded out is going to look stunning.

I don't expect them to but I don't mind. I'm glad a wider range of people will be able to play the game with it looking good.

But it shouldn't have to be modded to look that good. Skyrim is a 2011 game, Crysis and Oblivion are almost 6 years old. I'm sure in 5 years Skyrim will look as good as it should be for a 2011 game.. but by that time we'll likely be almost to Elder Scrolls 6.

All I'm saying is that there's really NO reason, other than pure laziness, not to include DX11 at launch. Or at the VERY LEAST, release a patch like Crytek did with Crysis 2. I think Skyrim looks fantastic on consoles... but looks very outdated on PCs. And we PC gamers should have the option to scale it up to make it look like a 2011 PC game.

Someone with a Ferrari shouldn't be forced to drive the same speed as a Subaru just because it's "more fair to everybody that way".




And great post Dale... very well said.

I can't believe the pic op posted is Crysis 1.
Even modded.
What mods do you need for this?

I mean in the other Crysis shots there is still 2-d grasses & trees aren't all that unique like in the first shot.
Shadows & lighting are much rougher in other shots.

Why are all PC people obsessed with graphics and DX11 support for everything?

What happened to the times were games were about the experience they brought rather than how "shiny" they looked?

I swear, by 2050 we will have AMAZING super-realistic games with little to no depth.
I have nothing against graphics. In fact i think they can ADD to the overall experience, but some people are just obsessed.
With that said i'll get back to playing daggerfall :celebration: .

This seems to be the go-to argument nowadays. But the fact is, it's not 1994 anymore. We don't have to choose between great gameplay and great graphics. You can easily have both with today's machines.

So while Skyrim's gameplay will no doubt be astounding, I can't understand why they don't just utilize DX11 for PC gamers so we can have amazing visuals to go along with the gameplay.

Here are some vids to add to the pictures earlier... basically what Skyrim looks like in my dreams lol (minus the guns and tropical setting)... exactly why I'm hoping Bethesda releases the necessary tools for modders to bring it up to this level:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shZzYkpl5Nk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOf686XKSWQ&feature=related

Gameplay is a different issue than visuals. However, you give me a Daggerfall with broken items fixed and incomplete features implemented and debugged, with current gen video and audio support, I'll take it and vanish for a few months. At least. And I daresay a lot of gamers would do likewise. Or with the same old graphics, as the =gameplay= is what makes DF what it is. Most of the games I have installed are older games, as too many new games have all the story substance of 'Mario falls off his mushroom. Again'.

And it isn't a case of 'Gotta have the glitter!' like the shooter crowd. It is a case of 'Wait a fracking second. They are deliberately designing this for graphics capabilities of two generations past so as not to offend the sensibilites of the 'casual gamer? Deliberately ignoring so many optimizations and features that would open up at least an order of magnitude's worth of available memory, take 10-20% of the render load off the CPU, freeing up cycles for other tasks. This isn't newborn tech; DX-11 has been out since Win 7 hit the streets. They already have 2 distinct generations of DX-11 capable cards in the Nvidia stable; not sure about ATI.

I have plenty of concerns about gameplay elements too, not just tech or lack thereof. I can't say anything for certain, as I obviously have never touched Skyrim, but it sounds less and less like a CRPG and more and more like a watered down adventure game with rpg-ish elements. I hope I'm wrong. I'd be delighted if my fears prove false. But I've been here since before Daggerfall went gold, and have seen things go down the lowest common denominator path since about halfway into Morrowind's development cycle (those who were here remember what announcement heralded that change....).

But the topic is tech, of which there are incredibly good reasons to take advantage of. And which is not being done for what far more than 10% consider to be lousy reasons. Squeezing the last drop of blood out of the DX-9 turnip would have been impressive 4 years ago. Now it begs the question 'why bother? It's obsolete'.

Because we hate the idea that all of the fantastic new effects and efficiencies that can be achieved with DX 11 are going to go to waste in order to maintain support for an antiquated, 5-year-old machine with almost no bandwidth and restricted to using antiquated rendering techniques.



And that's the point here. DirectX 11 implements excellent new rendering techniques that could seriously improve the overall experience (tessellation, better lighting, etc.), but because of the consoles, we will be seeing none of it.

As many people have already said, at the very least, Bethesda should take the Crysis road and offer a full DirextX 11 patch at some point so that PC users can actually get the most out of their investment.

I'm upset because the PC version is the one we'll all be able to play on a random netbook in 15 years and it would look much better than the old console versions plus it wouldn't require digging up an old console... and I'm only going to be playing the PS3 version of Skyrim in the foreseeable future. There's simply more longevity in the PC platform and I want the game to look as good as possible on PCs, as a result. I mean, Morrowind is now nine years old and my mom's work laptop maxes out all the original game's settings and the like, easily... and it looks much better than the Xbox version of the game (although I never played the Xbox version, I've just seen my brother play it). A decade from now, I hope the PC version of Skyrim, that I will surely be able to max out on a random laptop, looks as good as possible for a similar manner. Since everyone can eventually max out a PC game with a household appliance, why wouldn't everyone want the game to look as good as possible on said platform, as result?

Im a noob PC gamer my video card allows DX11 but what is it?

I do agree with making the game overall look better or maybe as best as they can without burning through their resources. However I really don't see a need to adding tessellation, displacement mapping, local reflections, etc. as that doesn't add that much to the experience.

I never was one for the whole 'graphics should look like *insert latest game title with best graphics*' argument people have nowadays. In fact i never really understood some of the mod for oblivion that gave you more graphical features like 'godrays'; i rarely even looked at the sky, much less directly at the sun.The things they did change, however, did not really 'wow' me, I don't spend my whole time on tamriel just glaring at walls or at the pretty rocks. And besides having too much graphical flare can distract a player from what is really important like killing cliffracers, or pushing the adoring fan down a hill.

All that asides i think yes Bethesda should aim to make the best experience they can both graphically and functionally. But if making the gameplay a masterpiece should take priority over making it beautiful.

From their perspective its just not worth doing. The amount of extra copies sold due to Skyrim supporting DX11 probably wouldnt even cover the wages of the employees who worked implementing it. Its great to see and all but at the moment very few PC gamers have systems powerful enough to handle DX11 features turned on and up to the max. A game doesnt need DX11 to look amazing as the screenshot in the first post of this thread has shown.

At the moment in time tessellation gives a very minor improvement in visual quality for a very noticable performance hit. You dont even notice tessellation unless you specifically go looking for it with the way its being used in games at the moment. Im sure a lot of people will rage at that but you all know its true. DX11 is only worth using for the performance gains.

People need to stop thinking DX11 is a super "make everything pretty" button because it isnt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8z8knMzIBw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06OO10O7q5o

Going from DX9 to DX11 in Crysis 2 eats up massive amoutns of FPS for such a minor improvement.

"A handful of vocal PC gamers" does not mean "all PC gamers." I will play Skyrim on PC and I think the graphics are fine. It's not lazy and I'm not sure why some people with powerful PCs expect the industry to revolve around them. The market doesn't revolve around people that spend the most money it revolves around the largest possible customer base.