Over the past couple of months I have been 'privileged' enough to finally play some DX11 games. I had played a couple before but only one was a true DX11 title. I will do a rundown on them in just a moment, but before I do that I will confess that DX11 is rather shit really.
As with some others (silly money wasting people like myself) I fell for the hype when DX11 was announced. Now I should have realised that such hyperbole should be taken with a large dose of sodium chloride but when DX11 released it was early in the year and the weather was shit. I know I know, you don't have to tell me, weather shouldn't really count for wasting money on computer parts. The thing is I am fortunate (depending on personality or whether you like dodging knives) to live where I do but winter here is cold and carries plenty of gusty winds ready to slice you in half. I guess it could be likened to living in London and running from a crazed fifteen year old but I still prefer the cold wind. Any way, during that time of year I become rather bored and tend to fall in love with updating my computer again.
It's not such a bad thing as at least it keeps my computer up to date and speed, and hey, I can't exactly go and stand on a beach in such inclement conditions so I really need something to occupy my tiny mind.
Thus, I tend to focus on getting my computer all sorted for another year of Facebook and the odd game.
Last year (man this year has gone so fast !) it consisted of an I7 950 with X58 goodness wrapped in a cheap Alienware crispy coated shell. A couple of years ago it was a Phenom II. Repeat ad nauseum.
However I have been a good boy this year. I haven't bought a single computer part nor messed around with my current configuration since April which is somewhat of a milestone for me.
Any way, where was I? At the time DX11 was released I had a GTX 280. It packed up and when I returned it I found that Nvidia were having a few dark months and were not providing any new cards. The ones that XFX did have did not last very long (given that the 280 was a shit card and got way too hot for it to be reliable) and so I had to take a Radeon 5770. I then decided to add another one to the mix as a single card was simply not fast enough, and DX11 was got.
The first game I got was the only one available at the time - Dirt 2. I deliberately enabled and disabled DX11 and concluded that the differences when hurtling through the woods at 110mph were not huge, but they were there. The lighting in particular was far less of a bright white glow and was actually quite warming to the face. I was happy, as this was the first true DX11 game (not counting the numerous patched games after it) and was very excited at the prospect of what was to come.
And quite frankly it just hasn't fucking happened. PAH.
The next title to grace my PC carrying DX11 natively was Alien VS Predator. Sadly Alien VS Predator was fucking shit and I played it for less than an hour before giving up. I had tried multiplayer with my pal D (thanks to him for giving me the motivation to write this blog, btw) and we concluded that it was more simple than a pot of play dough, only less entertaining.
So what has happened since? fuck all really.
Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas proved to me (especially the former running the HD Cinematic pack) that DX11 was still very much in its infancy. And not much has happened since to convince me otherwise. Sure, Dirt 2 is still a stunning game but it's not really enough is it? Thankfully the replacement for my 5770 Crossfire (because it was riddled with problems, the most unforgivable being the drivers and micro stutter) was far better. A GTX 470, in October of 2010, was £170. Which at the time was a complete steal and any way I needed something to take my mind off of cracking sounds and burning enamel that were emanating from my mouth (heavy dental work). I fitted a custom cooler on it and it has been happy days since. A very impressive card that even nearly a year later still offers all of the performance for the money I paid. That's very impressive for any computer component, much less a graphics card.
So games for DX11 have been very thin on the ground, but lately we have been 'treated' to quite a few of them. So how do they stack up? let's round them up.
I won't count in Battlefield : Bad Company 2 because it was a patch that made no difference (but admittedly also made no difference to the performance) but I will include Crysis 2.
First up then would be Dirt 3, as I am trying to do this chronologically. Dirt 3 IMO wasn't even as pretty as Dirt 2. I know, that sounds completely absurd but it was overhauled (apparently) to include rain and snow. Now the snow levels (providing they were at night, with snow falling, with the headlights on) were rather beautiful. This was emphasised by the fact that in most of those races you were allowed to drive the Audi Quattro, which was akin to hurtling down a hillside strapped to a fucking rocket. The problem of course is that I now owned a system based around the herculean GTX 295 (still around the fourth fastest graphics processor on the market) and I couldn't see any fucking difference at all, unlike Dirt 2. I don't even know if DX11 was in Dirt 3 but I am certain I read that it was.
Moving on - Crysis 2. Some said that Crytek deliberately held back DX11 to produce a second burst of sales. Some said that they were still working on it, I say - horse fucking apples. When I heard that Crysis 2 was patched for DX11 I became quite aroused and felt a stirring in my loins. Sadly when I read about what you needed to get it running at an acceptable level (a minimum 30fps) I found that it would need at least a GTX 590. If you didn't know what a GTX 590 is then I urge you to input the model into Google and sit down, as you will need to. The GTX 590 costs £650 and you're about as likely to find one as you are to get a dribbly blowjob from the queen. They are and were made in such short numbers that like the 5970 that preceded them they have reached rocking horse shit status. So basically Crysis 2 is playable on two cards, one of which being quite shit, too hot and completely uneconomical (the Radeon 6990).
So that rules out Crysis 2 then, and tbh apart from deeper track marks from vehicles that have passed over it and deeper pointing in brickwork it made fuck all difference. So what as next up? F3AR.
F3AR was a shit game. Please take a look at what I thought of it. Infact, it was so bad that I couldn't even fucking bring myself to say anything nice about it at all. It does, however, have DX11 and it does weigh in at a sensible gigabyte amount. Sadly DX11 made no difference at all other than a few jagged lights falling and a serious performance hit. A game that will not run on an I7 system with a 30% overclocked GTX 470 is simply not good enough. The performance problem was now beginning to become a problem. When these cards were released they were heralded as Next generation Direct X 11 graphics cards, capable of adding tesselation, new lighting effects and so on. Please see - Hyperbole, Sodium Chloride. The thing is that it is now becoming apparent that all of the cards sold before the GTX 580 (very expensive) are either not going to cut it to run these actual DX11 titles or, by the time they can they will be woefully out of fucking date. I'm pretty certain that these peformance problems are because DX11 is still in its early days (even though it's been out for nearly two fucking years) and could possily improve over time, but it does mean that any one who spent a considerable amount of money on nothing but promises have been hard done by.
Moving on then we have the next title - Deus Ex Human Revolution.
This is another game that when it is in DX11 mode suffers the exact same problems as F3AR does. I can only imagine that they are running on the same engine, because they both suffer the same fate. Micro stutters and slowdown seriously hamper the experience, but DXHR has other problems all its own. It's not exactly a fantastic game (fuck off telling me it is, it's not even as good as DNF) and feels very neanderthal like. I mean, to a fan (I never played any of the ones before it) it's probably a dream as the mechanics feel like they were written in 2001, but to some one like me it offers nothing new and feels rather boxy and clumsy. See, this is where I take exception to people who slagged off DNF because under the dated visuals DNF was a fucking good game with a good mechanic and a very long experience for your hard earned beans. Any way, sorry about that, as you can tell I quite like DNF. So any way, going back to DXHR. The DX11 has been implemented very, very poorly. First of all the dynamic shadows and lighting are very very jagged and some have reported that they fall all wrong. By that I mean they fall in the wrong direction, losing any feel of reality. Personally I didn't notice it, as all I did notice was that they looked slapped on and garish.
Now due to the performance issues (the stutter and lag and clumsiness) I decided to disable DX11 and revert back to DX9. However, when I did so I got the following - Deus Ex has encountered a problem and will be closed. Along with the message in my task bar that popped up in a small speech bubble "Nvidia driver crashed but has now recovered". I tried, in vain, for about an hour to resolve this (by hacking the registry and INF file) but to no avail. It seems that when installed DXHR detects your hardware and then forces you to play it accordingly. I could have put this problem down to bugs in the game itself but thankfully I do have a second gaming PC. The second one runs a Core 2 Duo with 2gb of ram, which you may think is laughable. Laughably (do you see what I did there? reverse psychology FTW !) even though it is based on three year old technology the star of the show is the massive, god like GTX 295. This card simply picked the game up and threw it around like a fucking ragdoll. Now I did notice that there were chunks of lighting missing, and I did notice that there were hardly anywhere near as many shadows, but to me it looked better. There were no jagged shadows and there were no jagged patches of light. So, I concluded that sometimes less is actually more.
I now play that game (when I can be bothered and am not playing Dead Island) on the GTX 295 PC.
Now, let us bring this to a close. A couple of days ago I played the absolutely fucking brilliant Hard Reset. The reason I liked this game so much is because it cuts the crap and gets into what counts very quickly. See also - Duke Nukem Forever. Story is not important here (phew) but what is is hard fucking core shooting and splatting, coupled with a good few explosions and bolts of electricity flying around. Hard Reset takes a lump of meat on the bone and gnaws through all of the meat, cutting the game down to the bone and giving you exactly what is says on the tin - a FPS. Gone are all of the stories that are just fucking terrible (look, games trying to be Hollywood just don't fucking work, so save your money and time trying to implement them and give us what we fucking want) and replacing it is a lovely, fast paced, stunning FPS.
Wait, did I just use the word stunning? Yes, I fucking did. Hard Reset looks incredible. Infact, apart from Battlefield : Bad Company 2 it is the best looking FPS I have played, erm, ever. BFBC2 was a stunning stunning game. Infact, so hypnotised by it was I that I once found myself staring at it fondly whilst fondling my penis (OK that didn't really happen, but I do like a bit of dramatic effect). But since BFBC2 we have been given the same regurgitated game engines over and over and over.
Most of these engines are based around the Unreal 3 engine which is really beginning to show its age. This will very probably change when I.D release RAGE later in the year, but for the here and now most
So, in summation DX11 is a complete waste of time. Don't get me wrong, you should buy a DX11 card (tbh you ain't got much fucking choice now as they are all DX11 based) but don't buy one for DX11. Buy it because these new cards are very fast indeed and can run DX9 titles very well. I have actually seen people consider buying a GTX 590 just to be able to play Crysis 2 at an acceptable level, but these people deserve to be set of fire and then pissed on. They only want to do it for bragging rights, and their seemlessly endless levels of stupidity will actually allow them to spend the same sort of money on a graphics card that could be used to get a very good gaming PC.
Thanks to Denver for giving me the motivation to type this blog. Cheers !
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