VGA performance: StoneGiant Engine (DX11)

StoneGiant BitSquid Engine DX11

All the new DX 11 hardware is certainly igniting an explosion of new DX11 applications. Swedish game engine developer BitSquid and game developer Fatshark have announced 'StoneGiant', a tech demo that showcases the power of DirectX 11. The public StoneGiant demo is expected to be released within a week or two.

StoneGiant allows consumers to test the overall performance of their consumer-based GPUs. Based on the BitSquid tech, StoneGiant has primarily been used to test the tools and technology in a real-world production environment with the talented artists of Fatshark.

"With DX11 hardware becoming more readily available, we decided now would be a good time to highlight the advanced features of our engine, including DX11 and tessellation support", said Tobias Persson, Lead Engineer at BitSquid. "Tessellation adds an awful lot to the visual fidelity of the scene and is something that consumers can readily see for themselves. We are looking forward to seeing how games will take advantage of our engine."

BitSquid have primarily focused on Tessellation in this demo, in fact pretty much most of the scene and its objects are tesselated. Tessellation adds an awful lot to the visual fidelity of the scene, and it's visible for all to see. They also use diffusion DOF but from what we see there is an issue in the current build with it on ATI cards.

Now here's where things get a little bit iffy as the results are abnormally high for the GeForce GTX 400 series.

The demo supports PhysX and BitSquid uses the PhysX API currently to collide the camera with the background. Its got a really fast solver for this sort of thing. Now read this carefully: we disabled PhysX for NVIDIA in their drivers (as we do with all benchmarks). The camera tracker as such should now be forcibly calculated over the CPU. By doing so we create similar conditions in-between ATI and NVIDIA.

Speaking from the top of my mind, the difference in FPS is too big to make sense of, so for your reference we'll include results of both ATI and NVIDIA DX11 class cards, but please be aware of this fact. We'll retest once the final demo is released.

One thing I have to add though, this demo runs incredibly smoothly compared to the competition.