11 Days of DirectX® 11, Day Two: Codemasters

By Raja

When a new version of the Microsoft DirectX® API is announced it can open the door to new effects, and can change the way games look, feel and play. When a new GPU is launched it can excite gamers and enthusiasts looking for ultimate performance. When a new game hits the shelves it can send a shiver of excitement through the gaming community. And when all three happen at once, you get a gaming trifecta – and it’s happening now.
You probably already heard about the ATI Radeon^TM HD 5800 Series of GPUs we launched a few weeks ago.  They’re powerful, they’re efficient, and they have the advanced features you need to be cutting edge.  And they’re arriving on the market at the perfect time.
Codemasters is well known around the world for their award-winning racing games. They’ve shipped more than 10 million copies of games including Colin McRae^TM Rally, Dirt® and Grid. Their newest game Dirt®2 is among the first games to adopt DirectX® 11 as a way to really push the boundaries of realism and performance in gaming.
Bryan Marshall, Codemasters’ Chief Technical Officer, says,

“We’re excited about DirectX 11 because it enables us to deliver a quality visual experience for the gamer. Features such as full tessellation support will allow us to add details to models not seen before.”

In games like Dirt2, developers are constantly walking a fine line. It’s the small details that help blur the lines between animation and photo realism, but more detailed characters can result in memory, bandwidth and storage issues. DirectX® 11 enables hardware tessellation, which allows the developers to create and send lower polygon characters and scenes to the graphics processor, which does the job of adding more polygons where details are wanted without negatively impacting performance. In Dirt2 the hardware tessellation helps crowd animations, water surfaces and dynamic cloth animations appear more lifelike and realistic.
The bright skies and long, cinematic shots in Dirt2 also get a reality boost from DirectX® 11 through Shader Model 5.0 which adds High Quality Shadow Filtering and Depth of Field to the scenes.
“We’re supporting DirectX 11 because we think it’s a big step forward in graphical capabilities and naturally we want to be on the cutting edge of development,” says Bryan Marshall, Codemasters’ Chief Technical Officer. “We think many other developers will be soon be making the same jump as us from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11.”
Dirt2 for PCs is scheduled to launch in December.  You can check out trailers and information about the game here.