drkohler said:
"DX11.2 was released a month before the Xbox One.." - and DX11.2 was in development for how long?? Did you understand my long post or chose to ignore it with a snide remark? Do you know that DX actually consists of TWO parts, a definition and an implementation part? Even if MS did not have a low-level IMPLEMENTATION part of DX11.2 (or equivalent driver in X1's case), they had the finished FUNCTION CALL part (and at least a high-level implementation part) essentially finalised months, if not 1-2 years before the start of X1. Whether that was usable or not we don't know, and we haven't really heard anyone complaining about missing driver-implementaion parts. |
Indeed.
People really shouldn't read too much into the version numbers, because they simply don't line up exactly with what that would suggest.
The horse's mouth spoke in depth before XB1 launch, and they specifically said they implemented low-level draw call into XB1 from the get-go, something that simply isn't available on DX11 in any PC implementation. With Mantle, one can see the difference between a high-level generalized API that has the CPU bogging the draw call situation, and one that unleashes that a lot. Basically XB1 is already out of the gate with the optimizations in question.
HOWEVER, there is some room for optimism, on all of the consoles and the PC.
Reason? Games had to be in development long before the devs even had their hands on the SDKs (using PC). So the optimization, while available from day 1 on XB1 in terms of low-level API, almost certainly wasn't taken full advantage of. People had deadlines to meet, so much of the early titles (and even many still to come) simply had to be sloppily put together in terms of actually taking advantage of what the XB1 can do. The same is inarguably true of PS4 for the same reasons.
TLDR : Games will look a good bit nicer by this fall in some cases, but don't expect anything earth-shattering either.
