I wrote about some leaked hardware requirements the other day for Battlefield 4 and since DICE has come out and denied those requirements which were not a big shocker. Now the little bit of news they did give us is that Battlefield 4 will support DirectX 11.1. While this is just a drip in a bucket it does give us some clues as to what is going on over at DICE. First off with Johan Andersson, the Technical Director on Frostbite for DICE, came out and said this,
“We use DX11.1, there are some optimizations in it (constant buffer offsets, dynamic buffers as SRVs) that we got in to the API that improves CPU performance in our rendering when one runs with DX11.1. This will be in BF4.”
While this is not that revealing it is interesting. Windows 8 is going to be the only operating system that will support DirectX 11.1 API. Microsoft in order to boost up Windows 8 is making this an exclusive since DirectX 12 isn’t anywhere to be found at least this year and possibly the next. Now the next item is that Nvidia’s 600 Series of Kepler chips have issues when it comes to DirectX 11.1. AMD on the other hand is fully compatible with DirextX 11.1 hence why AMD could have a leg up on the competition on two front. First is the existing 7000 series will be ready to go when Battlefield 4 launch, but since rumors are that part of the AMD 9000 series is launching come October that it will have bigger and better cards to run Battlefield 4 on. While this could just be how it is you gotta remember that the 17 minute trailer that was showed to kick off the Battlefield 4 campaign was using an AMD Radeon HD 7990 graphics card.
Battlefield 4