First Direct X 10 game is out

IF YOU play Company of Heroes, since the last couple of patches you may have noticed that one of the fields in graphics options carried a shaded DX10 marker.

DirectX 10 support was announced for the1.7 patch and with this patch coming out live today, the era of real games with DX10 API support has arrived. Bear in mind that patched games cannot be improved as much as the games designed from the ground up.

Nevertheless, CoH 1.7 brings support for "per pixel" lighting for all objects inside the game, four simultaneous lights with shadows thanks to Render-to-Cubemap and Geometry Shaders. Additional effects include soft particles and particle effects blending, grass is now short volumetric (DX10-instanced terrain shells), normal map compression is now on, foliage and ambient objects are now DX10-instanced.

Game also introduces new AntiAliasing mode, which you can expect to be heavily promoted by Graphzilla minions. Coverage Sampling AntiAliasing or CSAA is being touted by nV as "producer of Antialiased images that rival the quality of 8x or 16x MSAA", and allegedly bringing only a minor performance hit over using classical 4xMSAA mode.

If you want to see DX10 in action with this first-gen title, head over For ATi, you need to use latest Catalyst drivers (7.5), while for Nvidia cards you should download 158.45, a beta driver located on Nzone. µ

L'INQ
Nzone's CoH site with direct download of the patches