Rage3D take a look at Assassin's Creed D3D10.1 support

Thursday 17th April 2008, 11:54:00 PM, written by Rys

Rage3D have taken a look at the PC version of Assassin's Creed, a game I've been into for a long time on 360, to check out what's new when you run the game under Vista SP1.  You'll remember that SP1 brings D3D10.1 support.  Alex checks to see if the two are related somehow.

The answer is a resounding yes, with both performance and image quality improvements to be had if you have a D3D10.1 GPU (R6-class ATI only) and the Microsoft operating system that everyone loves to hate, along with its latest collection of fixes, improvements and additional features.

You can find the full article over at Rage3D, where they take a look at HD 3870 X2 performance, Quad Crossfire and the good old HD 2900 XT (a card I have a serious soft spot for, even if nobody else ever did).

http://www.rage3d.com/articles/assassinscreed/


Discuss on the forums

Tagging

amd ± radeon, d3d10.1, rage3d, morgoth, rocks


Latest Thread Comments (122 total)
Posted by AlexV on Thursday, 15-May-08 11:05:25 UTC
Quoting Arnold Beckenbauer
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7355&Itemid=1
It doesn't fix anything with the 10.1 path, it simply removes it.

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Thursday, 15-May-08 11:18:39 UTC
Quoting Morgoth the Dark Enemy
It doesn't fix anything with the 10.1 path, it simply removes it.
Unfortunately you are right.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,643633/Test/Benchmark/Assassins_Creed_Patch_102_im_PCGH-Benchmark-Test_-_Stellungnahme_von_Nvidia/
http://www.pcinlife.com/article/graphics/2008-04-02/1207107328d527_4.html

Great work...
But the broken PP effects are fixed.

Posted by AlexV on Thursday, 15-May-08 11:58:52 UTC
Quoting Arnold Beckenbauer
Unfortunally you are right.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,643633/Test/Benchmark/Assassins_Creed_Patch_102_im_PCGH-Benchmark-Test_-_Stellungnahme_von_Nvidia/
http://www.pcinlife.com/article/graphics/2008-04-02/1207107328d527_4.html

Great work...
But the broken PP effects are fixed.
They're not fixed as they were never broken through the DX10 path to begin with. It's like saying:dude, I just chopped off your arm because you had a nasty tatoo. But the tatoo is gone.

They also didn't fix the AA quality in DX10, which is inferior to both 10.1 and DX9. And there are reports on UBis boards that the same bugs from before the patch are there, so they didn't seem to fix/improve much if anything with this particular update, they just removed 10.1 for whatever reason they chose to.

Posted by Wesker on Thursday, 15-May-08 14:49:02 UTC
Quoting Arnold Beckenbauer

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7355&Itemid=1...

You can download the patch here and the complete list of fixes is as follows:

...

*- Fixed the performance improvements on ATI DX10.1 capable cards.*
Nice! That performance boost was really bugging me. :smile:

Posted by nicolasb on Friday, 30-May-08 14:53:18 UTC
Link: http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,645430/News/Ubisoft_No_Direct_3D_101_support_for_Assassins_Creed_planned/
Quote
*PCGH:* D3D 10.1 support in Assassin's Creed was a hidden feature. Why do you choose not to announce this groundbreaking technology? *Ubisoft:* The support for DX10.1 was minimal. When investigating the DX10 performance, we found that we could optimize a pass by reusing an existing buffer, which was only possible with DX10.1 API.*PCGH:* What features from Direct 3D 10.1 do you use with the release version? Why do they make Assassin's Creed faster? And why do FSAA works better on D3D 10.1 hardware? *Ubisoft:* The re-usage of the depth buffer makes the game faster. However, the performance gains that were observed in the retail version are inaccurate since the implementation was wrong and a part of the rendering pipeline was broken. This optimization pass is only visible when selecting anti-aliasing. Otherwise, both DX10 and DX10.1 use the same rendering pipeline.*PCGH:* Why do you plan to remove the D3D 10.1 support? *Ubisoft:* Unfortunately, our original implementation on DX10.1 cards was buggy and we had to remove it.*PCGH:* Are there plans to implement D3D 10.1 again? *Ubisoft:* There is currently no plan to re-implement support for DX10.1.

Posted by Mariner on Monday, 02-Jun-08 11:26:08 UTC
Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3320&p=6) are the latest to have a swipe at Ubisoft for removing DX10.1 support.

Posted by jb on Monday, 02-Jun-08 18:11:42 UTC
No plans to re-implment? How freaking lame and sad of Ubi :(

Posted by Scali on Tuesday, 03-Jun-08 09:30:48 UTC
Did anyone actually bother to test the DX10.1 path with an S3 card?
It might seem the obvious thing to do, but so far I've only found reviews/benchmarks with ATi cards. ATi is not the only one that supports DX10.1.

On another note, the Anandtech review does mention some graphical glitches in DX10.1 mode on ATi hardware. Not troublesome enough to make the game unplayable or anything, but there is some truth to the claim that the DX10.1 path doesn't work properly.
Who knows what it might do on S3 hardware...

Posted by AlexV on Tuesday, 03-Jun-08 10:01:26 UTC
Quoting Scali
Did anyone actually bother to test the DX10.1 path with an S3 card?
It might seem the obvious thing to do, but so far I've only found reviews/benchmarks with ATi cards. ATi is not the only one that supports DX10.1.

On another note, the Anandtech review does mention some graphical glitches in DX10.1 mode on ATi hardware. Not troublesome enough to make the game unplayable or anything, but there is some truth to the claim that the DX10.1 path doesn't work properly.
Who knows what it might do on S3 hardware...
If s3 would actually provide boards for review/have any sort of availability whatsoever, that testing would certainlt take place. Sadly, that's not quite the case.

Posted by Tchock on Tuesday, 03-Jun-08 11:14:57 UTC
I think they need 3 more swipes before caving in :D

As for the S3 cards, I'll see if I can bump into a lucky guy.


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