Tech Report has updated the article: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14707 Don't know why they bothered, but there it is. Jawed

It's hard not to buy into the conspiracy theory that UBIsoft will hold back a DX10.1 patch until Nvidia can get a DX10.1 class product on the market (if they ever do).

I'm sure ATI is more than willing to help them with any efforts with regards to "fixing" the DX10.1 path, especially considering it makes them much more competitive with the Nvidia offerings.

An interesting developement of this whole broohaha. That article at TGDaily (I think that's the one) mentions several developers praising DX10.1 codepaths in their upcoming games and commitment to shipping with DX10.1.

EDIT - had to go find it. http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37326/98/

Now if only we knew who that developer was. :)

Regards,
SB

It wasn’t me.

The statement isn’t the full truth either. You can eliminate this second pass with D3D10 (even with D3D9), too. But as you need to use an additional render target for this job this would require additional work on your shader code. The Direct3D 10.1 solution for this problem is much easier to implement as you just make a copy of the depth buffer at the right point.

Depending on your overdraw factor it could be a good Idea to keep this additional pass (but with MSAA active) to fill the depth buffer for Early-Z when it comes to the expensive shader rendering.

Conspiracy theories are definitely more fun, but why is it so hard to believe that both companies are telling the truth?

Here's a different theory: AC has been completed. The majority of the players who will buy the game have already done so. The A-team at Ubisoft has moved on to newer projects. The B-team stays behind to fix up urgent bugs and keeps the game in maintenance mode. (This is a common mode of operation in a lot of companies, BTW. It's a great way to let junior programmers/engineers gain experience before graduating to the A-team.) All additional funds spent won't result in meaningful additional sales and are basically a net loss, so effort is being kept to the bare minimum and rather than spending time fixing bugs in two render paths, they just limit themselves to the one that works for both brands.

Definitely more boring and straightforward than the conspiracy angle, which is exactly why it's way more likely...

It's one thing to risk your reputation for the gold standard of GPU benchmarks, it's a whole other thing to do so for AC (solid, but not exactly a blockbuster) after it has already been released, especially if the competition is still not blowing away your equivalent cards despite the 20% performance increase.

http://www.pcinlife.com/article_photo/9800gx2/screenshot/3870x2/_no_rt_assassinscreed_dx10_1680x1050_4aa_by_game_16af_by_driver_27fps.png maybe this is a example that "a problem that caused the post-effects to fail to render properly" ? (btw, i had found out why the fps is so slow on Radeon HD 3870X2, that was caused by the Rivatuner'S OSD)

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.

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.

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.

Nice! That performance boost was really bugging me. :smile: