Thread: Marginally different! (I kid, it's more like night and day)

http://pc.ign.com/articles/825/82595...0&RSSid=825955

Last two show the difference between DX9 and DX10. SM 4.0 really shows its capabilities.

Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket, the difference between that last screenshot and the first three is phenomenal. You can clearly see the raised surfaces on the ground are much better than in all the others, and the leaves on the trees have a level of transparency to them aswell. If you look carefully at the large tree right in the middle of the scene, you can see that HDR is being used to emulate "refraction" of the light due to particles in the air, as you can see the air is slightly darker in the shadow of the tree.

I guess I'll be installing Vista again, possibly even just for the demo (if the demo will include the DX10 features).

The last one has the "movie filter" thing too, not only the improved bump maps, filtering and DX10-only advanced lighting techniques.

I find that the slight grain of the movie filter effect greatly increases the picture quality when used subtly like this. One of the things about games trying to look realistic is that they often look too clean/perfect to trick the player into thinking he's looking at something that's real. The filter used in the highest quality pic does a good job of making things look a little less clean.

EDIT: Ok maybe it's more accurate to describe it as "hiding" the clean/perfect look, as when you look outside you don't get a grainy filter, so describing it as enhancing the realness of the image isn't very accurate. What I mean is that it somewhat hides the realisation that you're looking at an image made from polygons and textures by applying some variance to the picture. I've noticed that when I'm looking at a lower resolution game trailer it usually looks better than the game will when you actually play it. It's not that the lower resolution is better (it obviously isn't) but a side-effect is that it makes the tiny tell-tale signs that break the realism factor less noticeable, in the same way that this movie filter does.

O_o

Every new game makes me wish i had a better PC... better start saving up -_- Perhaps $1500 will be more than enough

too bad i wont be playing the game. =\

Originally Posted by Zaephyr

O_o

Every new game makes me wish i had a better PC... better start saving up -_- Perhaps $1500 will be more than enough

No thats just on the mark
1/3 will cover the video card
another 1/3 to cover the processor
and the last 1/3 just to buy a power supply that feed all this shit.

You still lack, Mobo and ram..
That counting your hd is new enough..

Originally Posted by irecinius

No thats just on the mark
1/3 will cover the video card
another 1/3 to cover the processor
and the last 1/3 just to buy a power supply that feed all this shit.

You still lack, Mobo and ram..
That counting your hd is new enough..

Eh no.
$1500 will give you a power supply and a processor only.

Originally Posted by Jyuu

Eh no.
$1500 will give you a power supply and a processor only.

You needed to point that out!?

Now, I'm sad. Since will be long that I'll have enought for a top, really top like Jyuu's, not a somewhat top kinda like what I was aiming for, computer.

But back on topic...

And I didn't like the "super high quality", looked like you had fog on the beach.. specialy because as someone pointed out, the lightining effect of the middle tree.. imo.. the HQ was pretty awesome, the S-HQ looked strange.

But of course, its impressive the quantity of effects, and the quality.
The rocks really poped out of the ground.

I just played the Crysis multiplayer beta with all the settings maxed (except DX10 "very high" settings aren't available in the beta), at 1680x1050 and it ran like a dream! In case anyone is wondering, that's the same settings as the third picture shown in the IGN article.

As soon as I switched on anti-aliasing though, the framerate dropped to about 30fps, which isn't as well as I'd hoped it would run. I'll be willing to sacrifice the AA to use the DX10 features if I have to, although normally 4xAA is my absolute minimum for any game.

Both 4x and 8x AA provided roughly the same performance for me. Options higher than 8x weren't available in the in-game options menu, and forcing anti-aliasing in the nVidia Control Panel caused graphical glitches and artifacts.

My specs, in case you want to know what to expect from your own PC:
GeForce 8800GTX (768MB)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
2GB DDR2-1066 RAM
Asus P5K Deluxe