Shadowex3

A lot of this is really not that different than what was advertised with dx10 vs dx9. We've had things like relief mapping and dynamic tessellation for quite some time, the problem is they've never become widely used enough to be worth the effort of making efficient. All these features: HDAO, tessellation, relief mapping (or its ilk), even raytracing are nothing terribly new. The trick is that they are at the stage right now that AntiAliasing was right as Half-life 2 was being announced and released.

Think about it. First Anisotropic Filtering became effectively free and the tech improved. Anti-Aliasing is pretty close to being effectively free at most resolutions in most games, and the tech is improving. Now we've got Ambient Occlusion getting thrown all over the place and while it does Hurt in terms of FPS in most games it's improving to the point where it's almost impressive instead of just chucking a shadow at everywhere that two edges meet.

I would say tessellation and relief mapping style effects had a chance to follow in the same vein... but the problem is that unlike all of the others these two can have profound gameplay effects depending on how they're used. I've got a feeling they'll be handled differently, probably with demos like these getting put out every major DX update until either the average gamer has the hardware handle it on full by default or it gets a Killer App that forces it to be mainstreamed like Half-Life 2 did for physics and voice communications.

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