Is It Worth Buying a DirectX 11 Card For Dragon Age 2? [Clip]
Bucky Alexander Gaming March 9, 2011
at
2:43 am
Since I had work I didn’t get to play much of Dragon Age 2 when it came out. I did manage to play for a bit, and I decided to make a comparison between DirectX 9 Vs. DirectX 11 using my new AMD HD 6950 graphics card modified to a 6970. What were the results? Not what I expected.
After fiddling around between DirectX 9, and DirectX 11. I noticed that DirectX 9 restricts users at medium settings with no shaders allowed. So if you want eye candy, you need at least a DirectX 11 card with 1 gig of video memory. DirectX 10 or 10.1 cards won’t work since the game doesn’t support it. I guess devs finally realized how useless it is. Anyways I took a screenshot, and recorded a video comparing DirectX 11 at max settings with all shaders turned on Vs DirectX 9′s medium settings. Can you spot the difference? Click the image for a larger view.
You can see the Anisotropic Filtering at 16x makes the character look more roundish, blurry, and less sharp in DirectX 11 compared to DirectX 9′s non filter. The DirectX 11 Tessellation allows objects to have a more realistic geometry effect by objects sticking out instead of being flat but you can’t really tell unless you really look at it. The environment textures look similar on both settings, and hardly considered “Very High Quality” on DirectX 11. At max settings with ambient occlusion, and shaders active in DirectX 11, the frame rate drops drastically. But on the other hand you can always disable the extra features in DirectX 11, and it will still run almost as fast as a DirectX 9 setting. *Hint ambient occlusion, shadows, and Anti Aliasing is the killer to any game performance. Always disable or leave it at low unless you want to lose frame rate.
To sum this up.. there are hardly any differences between the two settings aside from the glow, slight Tessellation, and ambient occlusion effects on DirectX 11. But what I don’t understand, why would they leave out glow, and Anisotropic Filtering in DirectX 9? It’s been on a lot of games so why remove these features? Maybe they are trying to push DirectX 11 out to the masses?
So if you are planning to spend your hard earned cash on a DirectX 11 card to experience Dragon Age 2 you should wait. Just hold on to your DirectX 9 and 10 cards till a proper DirectX 11 game comes out. If your PC can’t handle it you can always play it on an XBox360 or PS3.
thank you very much!! i play on my r4890 1gb for 2 years, and thought to buy 6950 but didnt want because of no sense. it would be much better to wait r7870 on 32nm.
No.