So, "We'll support DX11" possibly, probably means that they're going to have a few guys from Nvidia come in. Software engineers that will spruce up a few things with "Dx11!" features in exchange for Bethesda putting "The way it's mean to be played" or whatever on the box and as an extra 5 second intro movie. Why Nvidia? Because they're pushing this program much more than ATI right now, you can see it's handywork in the likes of Just Cause 2, Dragon Age 2, and etc.

Point is, the pc version will probably be a getting an extra shiny feature or three relatively on the cheap (for Bethesda) thanks to this. Which brings up the question of: when they come in, what do you want them to do?

Well, I created several categories, with examples down below, and a poll up above. So vote for whatever you'd most like to see, and then secondary choice, based off the examples below.

First off, we'll cover what you might want but don't need to vote for. A is, "Make it run faster" they always do this, so no need for a choice there. B is settings Bethesda really should just put in themselves, stuff that will take maybe a week of attention from one guy. Examples are: Having most lights cast shadows, which depending on a few things may be as simple as ticking a checkbox on a light in the editor that says "casts shadows". B, higher "Level of detail". As you should now, the more distant something is the less detailed it will be in a modern game. A few settings in the configuration file and suddenly more distant things will have better quality models and textures, done. C, Higher res shadows/More cascades. What does this mean? Well the higher res they are, the less blocky they look. Second, you know shadow draw in, how a shadow will suddenly appear as you get closer to something? Well that's an easy thing to change on the pc, a few settings, make sure they work right, and shadows could be cast on everything, to everything.

Categories:

"Global Illumination": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-_pnqXLIg4 not actually that expensive, obviously it's the light bouncing off the colored tapestries and onto nearby surfaces. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYoGJP5z_U4&feature=related another cheap and common technique that makes corners dark and objects seem more "attached" to the world.
Overall this would improve how the game looks pretty much no matter where you were.

"Tessellation": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdvZPIQpsQo a great new way to get games to look far more detailed than before. The basics of it is that the hardware takes a normal model, adds however many polygons you want too it, then moves those polygons around (ideally) based on a texture or "displacement map". This is great since you can add polygons exactly where you want too (they're far more noticeable on edges and etc.) and textures take up a lot less memory than a model with a lot of polygons. So tessellation could add a lot of detail, either through making distant objects and land more detailed for cheap and eliminating "pop-in" and/or through just making nearby things a lot more detailed (the normal maps already created for in game models can be converted to displacement maps, and used by tessellation hardware).

Materials: Different materials in the world obviously reflect light differently, like skin, metal, mirrors, etc. Screenspace subsurface scattering is a relatively new, cheap way to make skin (and a few other materials) look more natural and not so hard edged. http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/520/screenshot0209c.jpg , http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/6825/screenshot0208w.jpg obviously the face is brightly lit to highlight the difference, http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/9995/screenshot0204.jpg For other materials such as metal and etc. pretty much all games use a model called "Blinn-Phong" which is cheap, and relatively bad and plastic looking (why so many games look like plastic) a new "BDRF" or Bi Directional Reflectance Function such as http://jbit.net/~sparky/academic/mm_brdf.pdf could make the entirety of Skyrim look more real and less plastic, http://www.physicallybasedrendering.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/materials.jpg

"Direct" Lighting: Obviously you need light to see :confused: which would include things like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKHABmrTIn8 (the beams of light coming in through the trees), Cloud shadows (the clouds casting shadows, I don't think a visual example is needed :biggrin: ) http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/Papers/TemporalGlare.avi and better shadow filtering (edges, softness) in the form of http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/3/34023/1728980-percentage_closer_soft_shadows_super.png which is probably the best looking and "most correct" way to make soft shadows at the moment.

and finally... Water! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLu8DyzoVMs, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ou65tURHw&feature=player_embedded (http://www.gamedev.net/blog/715/entry-2249487-ocean-rendering/), and of course some actual reflections would be nice :goodjob: (notice they aren't there in any screenshot so far)

All of the above.

The Morrowind Overhaul has waves allmost like that for water. The same kind of shader. And SSAO, and DOF. So it looks better than Oblivion. Just the NPC models still look like crap.

Where do you come up with this sht? It's been stated that the engine will be compatible with DX11 but it's not going to have any DX11 features.

Nvidia software engineers sprucing up the game engine with DX11 features? Gimme a break. Not going to happen.

They said they aren't going to be implementing all the features. They did not say "DX11 compatible with no DX11 features." All DX versions run on modern computers. That isn't something that needs to be confirmed.

The "maybe nVidia people will come etc etc" thing is pure nonsense though.

I'm not a computer graphics expert so I'm not going to arbitrarily select features from a poll all because they look like cool options. Tech demos often emphasize the feature without a true comparison of how things can look, for example look at the Batman PhysX demo which makes it look as if there are no physics at all without PhysX. I'm hoping the features they don't use will be enabled for use by modders, but I'm not particularly worried about it. Oblivion looked fantastic to me, so I'm sure Skyrim will blow me away.

Only if they also have a DX11 card & operating system.

(adding up all the % in the "DirectX 11 Systems (Vista/Win7 & DX 11 GPU)" category of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, it only totals to around 17% of users. The "Direct X11 GPUs" category is much higher, but apparently many of those people are still running XP.)

The context of my quoted message was the suggestion by someone that they need to announce that a DX11 system could run a DX9 game. You are reading it backwards.

I was saying that because any modern machine could run a DX9 game, they did not need to announce that DX11 systems will support their game, as the person I was responding to suggested. They also claimed it was announced it would use no DX11 features, when the quote I read said they will not be implementing all the features. It would have been pointless to mention DX11 at all if none of its features are being used.

Tessellation would be the biggest thing for me. That's the most bragged feature of DX11. It really helps with model quality. But also, your option for improvements to water can really be credited to tessellation as well. It's all just about how it is used. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G9anRoYGko.

They said that, while they were making it DX11 compatible, they wanted all three versions (PS3, X360, PC) to look similar. So, while they might use new efficiencies and processing improvements, none of the grand, obvious, major features (like tesselation) should be there.

Really the most important graphical enhancement for me would be SSAO. I will be extremely disappointed if a modern game like Skyrim doesn't have it.

This

If the 360 cannot support it, PC will not have it

From the mouth of Todd Howard

The question remains, what DO we gain from DX11 if the big features aren't in?

Modding capability for sure.

I still maintain that's a flawed estimate. If people use their PC mainly for gaming, XP does the job just fine, there's no reason to switch to a modern OS if gaming is all you do. Similarly with graphics cards, there are still little enough proper DX11 games to justify the purchase of a modern card when years old cards still have more than enough power to play most games very well. I think we can expect to see those numbers skyrocket when more DX11 capable games start coming out.

I would expect to have use of the improved efficiencies that come with DX11.

Am I the only one who hates these dx11 topics!!
Bethesda knows what they are doing better then you or me, and they wont release an ugly game. I don't understand what dose it matter if it's dx11, dx10 or 9 as long as it look's good. When Morrowind came out you need'ed a pretty expensive machine to run it and so did Oblivion, both of these games looked great at they're time so there is no reason to not trust Bethesda.

Oh and btw Nvidia svcks. And by putting "The way it's mean to be played" means that Bethesda just became Nvidia's [censored]. I'm really glad they have nothing to do with Nvidia, especially with they're physx engine. What they are using right now will run evenly on Nvidia cards and ATI cards but I guess I that's off topic.

Well Creation engine will be used in next game projects so having inbuilt support for such features its reasonable, since adding such features in future will not take large amount of resources, support of such features will make engine more flexible for future, for modders support of such feature mean thats such feature can be modded more easy then before it was.
I f devs try make graphic outcome be similar on all platforms thats mean they have more spare resources for enhance other game aspects, like design to be more unique, larger amount of dialogues and quests, more deep gameplay with many features.

Graphic can be moddable if engine have inbuilt support of such features.

Kudos for that excellently justified statement.

Thing is that eye candy is a very strong selling point, whether you deem it vital or not. Take for instance Crysis, a game that was marketed on prettiness alone. Oblivion wasn't that different, not was it Morrowind. Both were huge state-of-the-art living, breathing worlds that pushed the hardware available to its limit. In the podcast, Howard complains about how the 360 memory limitations before the final launch build were providing more trouble than they'd like it to. That's a hardware limitation on consoles that did not compromise a single aspect of computer development. Dragon Age 2, Witcher 2, those are big name games of the genre that have embraced the current technology. There are talks about Mass Effect 3 doing the same, but I don't see it happening, personally.

Thing is, DIrectX11 is where technology is, today. When Oblivion launched most people had to upgrade or settle with worse graphics, because it provided something, in terms of software, on par with what was available on terms of hardware. Elder Scrolls games take long to develop, and I always found it amazing how, with Morrowind and Oblivion, the games simply do not age that much beetween entries. If you pump everything to the max , they presented(Oblivion still does) a very competitive graphical performance. The lack of DX11 features represents a step back when it comes to PC support(the platform that the series is more closely related to) and when it comes to being in sintony with current technologies.

Is it going to make or break the game? No. Would it be nice to have to make the game more long lasting in THIS certain department? Absolutely.

A game is the sum of its parts. Skyrim makes graphics a huge part of their selling point, as well as gameplay. Saying you don't care about Skyrim's graphics being on par with current sensibilties is like saying you'd be OK with the floating immobile head of the previous games.

If you're going by the "it's not that important" mentality, you'll probably end up with no changes at all. It's not like saying "those resources are better spent elsewhere" would make the animators and modellers grab a bunch of sheets of paper and suddenly start working out stat/skill mechanics.

In other words PC gamers get screwed over due to the console kiddies.

Exactly. Tesselation is the biggest must-have feature. So if that's not in, why would they bother with dx11 at all? Just make dx9 look as good as possible. And that seems to be working, because I like what I see in the screenshots and trailer (except for the low-res textures).
I just hope anti-aliasing will work on the PC. Lately, in more and more new games, it simply does not work anymore. Worst offenders: Unreal Engine 3 games. And if it does work in Skyrim; please Bethesda, don't make us choose between HDR and anti-aliasing like you did when Oblivion launched.

lets hope modders can fix dx11 features for us. Because obviously bethesda dont want as many pc sales because they wont take advantage of the dx11 tech for us who stood by them through arena to morrowind. which is a huge offense for pc gamers imo. We want the best experience, we're paying for neat graphics cards that can support it. And yet we're stuck 5 years behind in graphics becuase of the consoles...

That's actually for a good reason, many modern games use a technique called "Deferred Rendering" - in simple terms, it means that individual components of the scene are rendered separately and then combined. This is useful because, primarily, it means you only need one extra scene render per light, giving a huge speed improvement. The downside is that it's pretty much incompatible with hardware AA. It's not just lazy porting - the opposite, really.

DirectX 11 adds new functionality, but it also makes older processes more efficient. While we may not see many of the new features, we will get a faster game on par with DirectX 9 than other games that actually use that version. It would allow a roughly equal experience between Oblivion and Skyrim without much lag