Rage 3D has published an article on Radeon HD 3870 X2 performances in Assassin's Creed, a game optimized for DirectX 10.1. In 1920x1200 with anisotropic filtering 16X and anti-aliasing deactivated or in 4x, gains are far from being negligible.
With average gains ranging from 9% to 19%, respectively, results speak for themselves. However, we should keep in mind that this involves a single game and the test was carried out with a Core 2 QX9650 set at 3.6 GHz and 8 GB of DDR2-800 by a site known for its sympathy for this manufacturer. Moreover, the quality of anti-aliasing supposedly been improved. In short, it’s promising because it involves an entire game and not a demo, but it’s difficult to say how much it will carry over into practice.
Update:Following the recent hubbub surrounding the performance gains in DirectX 10.1, Ubisoft has just said
through one of its developers that it intends to eliminate this rendering via a future patch. The reason? The majority of gains come from the removal of a render pass in this mode. The developer however doesn’t say if this causes a problem for quality or if it’s just an “unfair” optimization. DirectX 10.1 support will make a return later, when it has been reviewed.
It’s obvious that Nvidia, for whom Assassin's Creed is part of its TWIMTBP program, must have thought it was unfair in seeing the arrival of significant information that points to the interest of this technology. Indeed, the company’s strategy has been to make it look useless as long as possible in order to justify the absence of its support on the GeForce 8 and 9. It’s an omission that we think is partly voluntary on recent chips because its integration would mean giving it credibility when AMD has an entire line adapted to DirectX 10.1.
