IGN
AU has conducted an interview with Keita Iida, Director of Content
Management at NVIDIA, talking about DirectX10 and the evolution of their Geforce
graphics cards. Iida goes into detail on the differences between developing for
the PS3's RSX graphics processor, and the latest development tools to hit the
scene. They also pressed him for comment on Ubisoft's jaggy-infested PC versions
of Ghost Recon, Silent Hunter and others. Here's a taster:
IGN AU: Crysis is probably the other really big DX10 example. We've heard
a few reports about the performance of that under DX10 and we have an
expectation of how this game will look, based on all the screens that have come
out. Can you comment on the performance of that? Will we get to see all of this
eye candy running on today's hardware?
Keita Iida: We have nothing but pure confidence - especially with
8800-series cards - that with Crysis, you're going to have a tremendous
experience. Again, since they're developing with 8800 as a reference, their
target is going to be 30, if not 60, frames per second at relatively high
resolutions. With DX10, given that it's a clean break from DX9, there are a lot
of new art assets that need to be created; there are a lot of special effects
that need to be written. Usually what they do is, when they take the DX9 engine
and port it to DX10, they need the underlying renderer to support the DX10
features, and then they add the features on top of it - whether it's art or
game-building.
What happens is, first, you need to get the game up and running; get the
features implemented. Right now, Crytek, with Crysis, is in the process of
adding new features and will soon be at the optimisation stage. That said, we
would love to show you the game running on 8800 hardware, but we're bound by
NDAs, and that's a decision bound by EA and Crytek; but we have every confidence
that, by the time it's ready to be demonstrated to the public on DX10 with the
8800 or whatever advanced hardware is available at the time, it's going to run
perfectly fine.
IGN AU: Can you comment on what happened with NVIDIA's Vista drivers? You
guys have had access to Vista for years to build drivers and at the launch of
Vista there were no drivers. The ones that are out now are still basically
crippled. Why did this happen?
Keita Iida: On a high level, we had to prioritise. In our case, we have
DX9, DX10, multiple APIs, Vista and XP - the driver models are completely
different, and the DX9 and 10 drivers are completely different. Then you have
single- and multi-card SLI - there are many variables to consider. Given that we
were so far ahead with DX10 hardware, we've had to make sure that the drivers,
although not necessarily available to a wide degree, or not stable, were good
enough from a development standpoint.
If you compare our situation to our competitor's, we have double the variables
to consider when we write the drivers; they have much more time to optimise and
make sure their drivers work well on their DX10 hardware when it comes out.
We've had to balance our priorities between making sure we have proper DX10
feature-supported drivers to facilitate development of DX10 content, but also
make sure that the end user will have a good experience on Vista. To some
degree, I think that we may have underestimated how many resources were
necessary to have a stable Vista driver off the bat. I can assure you and your
readers that our first priority right now is not performance, not anything else;
it's stability and all the features supported on Vista.
