Well, I am using an Alienware laptop for my main development. I an really not too sure if it is set up write as the fps has never been great. Trying to get hold of drivers for this is hard and although it has 2 SLI'd graphics cards only one ever seems to get used.
Playing Starwars online only ever gave me 10 fps at best until I upgraded the bios, however the damm laptop kept resetting the graphics driver back to the original reducing the the fps back down to 10 fps. Highly frustrating to say the least, especially when I was getting up to 60 fps on a good day.
In the end I gave flashing the bios every couple of days to get the GPUs to work properly so now it using a single GPU and when testing DirectX 11 examples I get an astonishing 3.5 fps on basic scenes. Not what I would call exactly fast.
So this means that I really need to think about what I can do with what I have. Direct X 10 appears to work much better and I maybe able to upgrade to 11 at a later stage.
Dissapointing to say the least but I need a stable system to work with and a reasonable speed. This is one of the problems of being out of work, no income and no cash to spend on anything to improve yourself. Ho hum...
So.... DirectX 10 - here we go!
Monday 10 September 2012
Sunday 9 September 2012
DirectX which version ?
Done a lot of programming over the last week and playing with HLSL. Ive had a few books on the subject for a while, but never really done too much on this side of things. It has been quite hard going at first trying to make sense of things by just looking at code and some sparse description on how it works.
However, it is all beginning make a lot of sense now, and having discover what more is available I am now really re-considering which version of DirectX I should really cater for. My original thinking was to use 9.0c as I had already developed some code for it, but it is rather old now to say the least. The original thinking had been to support some of the earlier versions of Windows, but as time progresses, I think that would perhaps now be a poor policy.
I have DX11 already on my 64bit Windows 7 and the SDK for DX10 so it wont be too much hardship to change header definitions and recompile for DX10, fixing stuff as occurs.
Having looked at DX12, I am not sure if I should go down that route so I am still undecided. Bearing in mind that most of the pretty stuff is done using the programmable pipline and HLSL I am not sure what benefits I would gain from it over DX11.
OpenGL support has also been at the back of mind too, but I think the learning curve for both might be a bit too steep for me. However keeping the engine open ended it may not be a too big problem to change the interfacing
By the way I am writing this while the closing ceremony for the 2012 Paralympics is just finishing. The whole event has been so inspiring and there have been times when I wish I was much younger and be in a position to do something.
Anyhow, I digress....
The Directx 11 SDK has just finished downloading so time to take a peek and see what is what.
However, it is all beginning make a lot of sense now, and having discover what more is available I am now really re-considering which version of DirectX I should really cater for. My original thinking was to use 9.0c as I had already developed some code for it, but it is rather old now to say the least. The original thinking had been to support some of the earlier versions of Windows, but as time progresses, I think that would perhaps now be a poor policy.
I have DX11 already on my 64bit Windows 7 and the SDK for DX10 so it wont be too much hardship to change header definitions and recompile for DX10, fixing stuff as occurs.
Having looked at DX12, I am not sure if I should go down that route so I am still undecided. Bearing in mind that most of the pretty stuff is done using the programmable pipline and HLSL I am not sure what benefits I would gain from it over DX11.
OpenGL support has also been at the back of mind too, but I think the learning curve for both might be a bit too steep for me. However keeping the engine open ended it may not be a too big problem to change the interfacing
By the way I am writing this while the closing ceremony for the 2012 Paralympics is just finishing. The whole event has been so inspiring and there have been times when I wish I was much younger and be in a position to do something.
Anyhow, I digress....
The Directx 11 SDK has just finished downloading so time to take a peek and see what is what.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)