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WilliamWatts on 15 January 2010
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Garcian Smith said:
WilliamWatts said:

No game will require it for a long time but they will soon drop DX9 support and focus on the DX10+ codepath. Pretty much every feature in DX11 can be emulated by DX10 hardware aside from tessellation. However emulated support for more advanced shaders etc will be slower than native support. So by the end of this year there should be a clear lead for the 5750 against the 4850 and the 5770 against the 4870. In addition to this the other abilities of the GPU are more useful, like for example accelerating encoding or GPGPU type tasks with Shader Model 5.

There's really no evidence at this time to support anything that you said. Again, at the moment there's only three games that support DX11, and the only notable ones coming in the future with announced support are Aliens v. Predator, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Crysis 2, and a couple of MMOs. And those will display just fine on a DX10 card.

As always, buying with "future-proofing" in mind is stupid. Just get a DX11 card in two years when more than a handful of games can utilize it and you'll need to upgrade anyway.

If there was no evidence then I wouldn't have said it.

They will also display fine on Direct X 9 cards but thats besides the point. The major point is that Direct X 11 is both an improvement in image quality and efficiency, so if you take cards with relatively similar specs like 800 ATI stream processors then the Direct X 11 cards will either be faster or offer better image quality for around the same performance. In addition to this they are incredibly power efficent and the difference in cost will be made back on idle power consumption alone.

The number of DX11 games will increase rapidly as we approach the end of the year. For most game announcements and release we have to wait until after E3 before we can see the whole range of games which will be supporting the standard. Its only a few hours work to recompile a game from Direct X 10 to support Direct X 11 so aside from games which are deep in their Q/A stage and are feature complete, we will see almost every DX10 game support Direct X 11 to some extent.

43 Watts less idle use than the 4870, 38 Watts less than the 4890, 19 Watts less than the 4850.

107W less than the 4890, 100W less than the 4870, 61W less than the 4850.

Assuming 4 hours a day use with 1 hour under load the 5770 compared to the 4870 will use (3*43*365) + (1*100*365) = 83.5kw/h. Assuming 10c per KW/H the HD 5770 will use $8.40 less than the HD 4870 per year and $16.80 over the lifetime of two years. The cheapest 4870 on NewEgg is $170 and the cheapest realistic 5770 is $162.