Differences between dx9 dx10 and dx11

[Guest]

what are the difference between dx9, dx10 and dx11

 

[Lmeow]

DirectX 11 has tessellation, which is biggest difference between the three, the other two do not have DX 11. DirectX 11 makes graphics look more realistic as it is more '3D', things stand out.

 

[jaguarskx]

^^^

DX 9 -> DX10/DX11 expect a performance hit.

DX10 -> DX11 not sure.

 

[Lmeow]

DX 10 -> DX 11 = slight performance increase I believe.

 

[jyjjy]

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/directx_11_deconstructed

 

[gamerk316]

DX10:
* Fully programable pipelines
* New state object model
* SM 4.0
* Geometry Shaders
* Texture Arrays
* Predicated Rendering
* Insatancing 2.0

A lot of the changes were made due to underlying changes to WDDM in Vista, and as far as grahpical OUTPUT, there were very minor additions (mostly due to SM 4.0).

DX11:
* Tesselation
* Multithreaded Rendering
* Compute Shaders

Multithreaded Rendering is really the big addition to the API, but will cause a LOT of difficulty for games that also use the standard DX9 for compatability with XP (as all the work with Multithreaded Rendering would need to be re-written/optimized for the DX9 code path). Tesselation is really the last major graphical improvement I can think of for Rasterization, but is a major source of slowdown due to all the computation involved in the process.

The point being, there are very few obvious graphical changes between the three API's, the updated Shader Models and Tesselation being the only changes obvious to people viewing the outputted results.