Date:
Monday , December 01, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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FarCry 2 DX9 vs. DX10 Performance

FarCry 2 is the first game we have evaluated that shows DX10 in Windows Vista to provide greater performance than DX9. Finally, DX10 makes a performance difference, and finally it is for the positive. We examine that A2A along with AA performance and multi-core CPU testing.

Introduction

Before reading this evaluation please take a look at our FarCry 2 Gameplay Performance evaluation. In our initial evaluation we examined real-world gameplay and found out how well FarCry 2 plays across the board from the low-end to the high-end of current generation video cards. This evaluation is to further our testing to show you how DX9 compares to DX10 in FarCry 2 since it is an easy option to select in-game. The question is should you be running FarCry 2 in DX9 or DX10 for the best performance, and this evaluation will easily answer that with some very interesting results that we are excited to tell you about. In our gameplay performance evaluation we found that DX10 was playable on each video card, and this evaluation here will show you why.

Before we dive into this evaluation keep in mind this is going to be to the point, direct and not the full extent of our FarCry 2 coverage. We have planned later this week to show you via a plethora of screenshot comparisons what the real-world image quality difference is between DX9 and DX10 to complete our testing.

One feature present in FarCry 2 we did not talk about is the inclusion of some DirectX 10.1 coding to improve antialiasing performance. Now, of course only the latest AMD Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs support DX 10.1, NVIDIA GPUs do not. However, NVIDIA GPUs, like any current generation GPU, are very programmable and there is a way to exploit DX 10.1 like features out of the GPU if coded specifically for it. This is the case in FarCry 2 for NVIDIA GPUs (read GTX 200 series.) This excerpt comes from NVIDIA documentation on FarCry 2 features:

FarCry 2 reads from a multisampled depth buffer to speed up antialiasing performance. This feature is fully implemented on GeForce GPUs via NVAPI. Radeon GPUs implement an equivalent path via DirectX 10.1. There is no image quality or performance difference between the two implementations.

This statement implies that the DX 10.1 implementation and the NVAPI implementation produce the same result, and that is to speed up multisampling performance under DX10. We will test antialiasing performance differences in this evaluation.

Game Settings

Thankfully in FarCry 2 we can easily test between DX9 and DX10 since all in-game settings match up exactly between both APIs. All we have to do is select the renderer, either DX9 or DX10 with all the game settings at their highest values.

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Here is the in-game menu with DX9 selected.

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Here is the in-game menu with DX10 selected; you will see that both match up exactly. Therefore we can run apples-to-apples tests with the game at the highest settings. We will be using a 1GB Radeon HD 4870 video card and a 1GB GeForce GTX 280 video card. Keep in mind the idea is not to compare the video cards here, obviously we know the GTX 280 is faster and is not a price match for the 4870 1GB. The goal of this evaluation is to compare DX9 vs. DX10 with and without AA on each card to itself. For our evaluation on comparing each video card to each other read our FarCry 2 Gameplay Performance evaluation.