Comments on: Amping It Up: Dirt 2 & DirectX 11

By: DerangedStoat

DerangedStoat — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:33:36 +0000

Actually, I think he’s correct in his view that this panders to American tastes.
Dirt 2 is far more ‘Travis “extreme11!1″ Pastrana’s DiRT’, than it is ‘Colin McRae’s Rally’.
Just look at the WRX used for most of the ingame footage, and even the Codemasters logo reveal. It’s Travis’s.
As an Aussie, I follow the WRC closely, but I’ve never heard of Travis outside of American car blogs, and from what I’ve read it sounds like he is a big name in the US rally series (not the WRC, which USED to the be the stable of the Colin McRae rally series).

I think just as fans of the Colin McRae Series, we just have to suck it up, and accept that it’s not going to return. Replaced (not continued) by some other game with a catchy name and XTREME! marketing.

(FWIW, I also believe that the whole ‘extreme’ spin on sports and the like, is very much an American export, albeit a successful one)

By: Death by Toast

Death by Toast — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:07:04 +0000

Wow, those videos actually make me excited to see more of DX11. And I am no racing fan. Maybe DX11 will be to DX10 what Windows 7 is to Vista: it finally succeeded in doing what the predecessor was trying to do.

By: fugo

fugo — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:45:14 +0000

Wisq – directx10 was actually a big leap in terms of allowed developers greater freedom in customising the way games are rendered. have you noticed that since directx10 appeared games look more individual?

By: gonkamatic

gonkamatic — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:38:40 +0000

Who the hell tries to sell sports paraphernalia on an article where nerds have come to discuss the merits of Divx11???? Next stop the UN website.. to an article about famine to flog diet pills I guess?

By: woppin

woppin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:53:14 +0000

It’s more imo. The tesselation support and compute shader support are what end users will notice, much like when vertex texture fetch/SM 3.0 was added a bunch of extra effects were made possible, but from the developers’ point of view inheritence support in HLSL is a huge advantage over the shitty 100,000 line uber shader style that a lot of devs were unhappy with.

DX11 looks great, DX10 was a bit borked but that was due to so many factors – NVIDIA screwing up virtualisation, Vista sucking hard, no real new features to speak of, and a complete change in architecture from both manufacturers along with the entire concept of geometry shaders being pretty useless (imo). In contrast level-of-detail through tesselation and much more accessable GPU-physics calculations through the compute shader (or AI pathfinding) should actually make DX11 games better than DX9 ones.

By: Kenny

Kenny — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 04:13:07 +0000

I bought a Radeon 5870 from Saphire last week and got a free copy* of Dirt 2 with it, also got a free copy of Battlestations Pacific.

So if you like racing games and are planning on getting a sparkly new graphics card grab a Saphire 5870, unless you have XP… because ATi got lazy and decided not to give the 5870 proper driver support on XP.

*Technically I got a coupon for a steam store purchase.

By: Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:14:21 +0000

Stick to your tea, crumpets and silly prejudices.

By: TheSombreroKid

TheSombreroKid — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:23:29 +0000

ohh and dx11 is to dx 10 what dx 9 is to dx 8

By: TheSombreroKid

TheSombreroKid — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:23:00 +0000

not ot mention all the subtle improvements of vista roled in to a nice user friendly package

By: Günter

Günter — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:37:21 +0000

No, they’re pandering to the taste of the majority. Not every gamer outside of the states is a hardcore simulation fan. The top selling games in the UK are Halo and GTA, just like every other part of the western world, so throwing anti-American sentiment in there just makes it sound like you have a stupid prejudice.

By: Bradley

Bradley — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:43:45 +0000

Hey guys, Jim has let us know about the video issue and we’ll work to fix it today. Sorry about that! Seeing an ad but not the video… lame :(

By: Alastayr

Alastayr — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:42:16 +0000

There are many "killer" features in Win7 that make XP obsolete in my eyes. To name a few:
- a real x64 version (you'll never go back once you've had 8GB RAM)
- DirectX 11 (it's worth it this time)
- fine-tuned UAC
- simplified Taskbar (finally makes sense)
- secure and reliable driver model (especially WDDM 1.1, I <3 it)
- a lot of usability tweaks that make working with the OS a better experience

Some of those features were in a way or another in Vista, but the execution was lacking. Win7 enables me and XP to part on (mostly) good terms, as XP is rapidly showing its age.