Well, you quoted my entire first post, but did you read it?

Even if you have a DX9 or DX10-level GPU, as long as you're running Vista/7 you're "using" DX11. It's a matter of whether you're using any of the features. He has stated it "supports" DX11. Not "requires" or "utilizes DX11 features". He has said quite the opposite. He has said it "supports" DX11 but does not use the DX11 features, explicitly mentioning tessellation even. He has further stated the game is DirectX 9 in terms of the shaders and code.

Furthermore, the topic is on tessellation. Yes, there could very well be a DX11 executable with none of the DX11-level features. This executable would therefore be USELESS. It would essentially require DX11 hardware (and Windows Vista/7) without any benefit over DX9. They're not going to lower their PC sales by requiring DX11 outright like some games. But if they're going to simultaneously support both DX9 and DX11 with separate executables, they are doubling the codebase, the maintenance, and maybe even the cost to develop and maintain the PC version. If they're not including any "big ticket" DirectX 11 features (which they've already said) you can also assume it's not going to do anything for their PC sales by having a DX11 version which doesn't have tessellation, or use compute shaders, or anything flashy to advertise. They would just be spending more money on producing a DX11 codebase without any reward.

I would come up with an anology to try to explain to you what Todd meant by "supports" in this context, but I don't need to. He immediately stated that they weren't utilizing any of the features like tessellation. He has further stated the shaders are only DirectX 9... This is an important clue. As of DirectX 10 essentially everything is a "shader". Tessellation is a series of shaders (and one fixed function)... Compute is a shader. I could go on. But he's stated they aren't using DirectX 11 shaders... and thus none of the DirectX 11 features that could possibly matter. Yes they may for some reason decide to have a DX11 executable, and utilize some features in the DX11 API, but I can't think of any reason for going through all this effort to write a DX11 codebase and not use any DX11 shaders. Many big improvements are in the Shader Models. If they're still using Shader Model 3 (DX9) they're not going to be able to access all of the improvements in Shader Model 4 and 5. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that's NOT a shader but was a big addition to DirectX 11 is Deferred/Immediate contexts, and other multithreaded rendering additions. The issue is that current drivers basically do not support multithreaded rendering and actually hinder performance if it's used. Blame AMD and Nvidia for that.

Frankly, the way it was stated was a PR-friendly way of saying "This is a DX9 game". "Supports DX11" - "DX11 features" + "DX9-only shaders" = a DX9 game.

I may be wrong, but that looks to me like someone created parallax maps from the textures' normal maps. There were mods that did the same for Oblivion.

I'd guess this will probably be possible for Skyrim, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Crysis uses parallax occlusion mapping. That's the second best thing there is, looks pretty awesome.
Not sure what stalker uses.
Oblivion used parallax mapping (not the same as above) on a few textures. It looks mediocre / half-bad.

Ah, got you. I thought shayologo was saying those were mods for Crysis and Stalker Pripyat. My bad.

Would be cool if Skyrim supported tesselation and left it to the modding community to modify the assets for it.

POM or any of the pixel based depth tricks are horribly inefficient, though. In my testing tessellating a simple plane into a cobblestone-like road resulted in 600+FPS under the conditions, whereas POM plummeted to 150FPS or so. The issue is that these are pixel shader techniques, and trying to mimic depth per-pixel is expensive and kind of silly. It's cheaper just to add more geometry. It does matter how much of the screen the POM effect takes up, like any pixel-shaded effect, however. The artifacts generally outweigh the aesthetic benefits also. Still not having proper silhouettes to a mesh is a big detractor, and if the sampling is too low it just looks down right awful.

I'm not sure if the non-PC versions of Oblivion used the parallax mapping effect, so I'm not sure I can cite the Skyrim shots we have now as evidence, but I haven't seen any evidence of PM/POM and especially not tessellation of course. The thing most people may not know is that the Xbox 360 can actually do POM and tessellation, but it's hardly ever implemented. The 360 does more or less use "DirectX 9.5" and its GPU hardware has the kind of Unified Shader Architecture present in DX10+. But nevertheless I hope they don't actually take a backwards step and have no kind of parallax mapping at all. So far there isn't evidence for it, but they may not be including the feature in the console versions.

As usual jwd your posts are like reading a technical manual. Thanks sharing your knowledge with us.

Fallout used parallax mapping but i never saw it in Oblivion.

I hope it will be possible in skyrim for mod, i really want a complete 3D immersion for ground and wall, not just flat thing

It's used on a few textures. Some of the stone wall textures in houses and around castles, for instance. The ruined forts too. But it's really not used all that much.

I'm not a tech expert though. When I read that they would allow the game to use DX11, I'm assuming that they meant it would take advantage of the optimization to make DX9 features run faster is all.

Yep. DX11 support for Skyrim will be purely for performance purposes. We won't get tessellation or DX11 shaders. Those kind of features would require way too much time and effort on BGS's part for a minority of the community.

Thanks a bunch that saved me a lot of googling around. and yes i agree this example is way too extreme.


Not true! when i ran up the most recent Aliens vs Predator game, i saw this DX11 features menu in the options and i clicked it and it said Tessellation. and i had no clue what this meant, so i googled it and spent like 10 minutes looking around on google but didn't find anything i actually was able to understand.


And at the rest of this thread... i wish they would at least make it "Support" DX11 to the extent that anyone who has a bit of skill can just add it into the game as easily as you would add a graphical overhaul (i basically mean, giving us a DX11 exe after the game has been out for a while). because even if todd howard has said that the game wont use tessellation doesn't mean its unable to use it, since he has also said they want to support the modding community, unless i missed something.

Would we need a DX11 executable to make use of the DX11 "performance gains" Todd was talking about?

Good ol' google. I remember trying to find something out, and the first two threads from different forums that showed up at the top of the search results asked the same question, but the only thing that I saw was people complaining that he should just google it.

Not specifically. DX9 and DX11 can be used in a single executable. Depending on how the engine is set up, the DX9 and DX11 renderers can be in separate DLLs (CryEngine does it that way), so there could be separate DLLs for DX9 and DX11, but they'd be used by the same executable. You'd only need a separate executable for a 64-bit version.

Which I hope we also get, but that's another discussion.

Oh, I don't doubt it. You suggested that you might sound like you've been living in a cave and i retorted that you sounded like you were to lazy to use Google. I didn't say you were, just that is sounded that way. Wasn't trying to take a jab at you just discussing semantics.