We've tested five of the earliest available DirectX 11 titles and we're happy to report that the situation this time around is looking quite favorable for early adopters. While we observed performance hits when switching to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9 in all five games, we also observed a noticeable corresponding image quality improvement. The drop in performance for DirectX 11 in our tests can be attributed to the added image quality. Effects like tessellation, screen-space ambient occlusion, advanced post processing and DX11 exclusive anti-aliasing in some games brought the performance down in our testing, but they also boosted image quality.

What's more, it would seem that some of the games actually performed noticeably better in DirectX 11, compared to DirectX 10 and 9, when the extra image quality features exclusive to DirectX 11 were not enabled, as we observed in Alien vs. Predator. This suggests that DirectX 11 rendering paths can be faster than their DirectX 9 counterparts while maintaining the same image quality level in some scenarios.

In terms of image quality, the new effects and graphical tricks we saw with DX11 added some extra realism not available in DirectX 9. Effects like screen-space ambient occlusion, depth of field, and tessellation really brought the graphics up a notch, adding extra atmosphere and realism to games like Aliens vs Predator, Bad Company 2 and Dirt 2. However, these effects were generally quite subtle and are nothing as dramatic as the image quality changes brought on by DirectX 8 or 9 in the past, which both offered major milestones in shader technology. It's also worth noting that, except for tessellation, these effects are all technically possible without DirectX 11 and compute shaders, as proven by Crysis.

DirectX 11's hardware tessellation and DirectCompute API have great potential, but currently they're being used to implement effects we've seen before since Crysis was introduced. While that certainly doesn't sound very impressive, it's worth noting that although the graphical effects are nothing new, DirectCompute now makes them much more efficient. So efficient, that all five games were able to run at full HD resolution (1920x1200) with all the graphics setting cranked to max without much trouble, even on the affordable $150 Radeon 5770. This means that game developers will be much more willing and likely to implement these effects in their titles, so watch for them in the coming months. Overall, performance in currently available DirectX 11 games is excellent.