Developer Dan Baker explained us how DirectX 11 enhances not only the visual appeal of the new strategy game Sid Meier's Civilization 5 but how its direct compute abilities contribute to the game's performance. Also he explains, how Civ 5 is a little further developed than PCs are.

DirectX 11 offers great performance increases, if developers know how to use the new APIs right. Firaxis, the developing team behind Sid Meier's Civilization 5 spent plenty of time finding out how to really improve gaming experience with tesselation and direct compute 5 in store. In an interview, Dan Baker - Firaxis Games' Graphis Lead - told us in detail, what they did with DirectX 11.


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2) DirectX 11 offers Direct Compute 5 for GGPU calculations. In what way does it allow you to optimize, simplify or speed up the rendering process in your game (e.g. post effects)?

Civilization V uses the Direct Compute Features for a new proprietary variable bit-rate texture compression. Users will notice that on high end DX11 native hardware, the leaders will appear almost instantly, regardless of how many civilizations are present. There will also be no paging-in on the textures in the background as they are loaded since the 2gigabytes of leader textures compress to less then 150mbs altogether. This type of compression was, until recently, considered impossible or impractical, but we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for what can be done with Direct Compute.

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Read the full article at PC Games Hardware.