The Frostbite engine, the engine behind the latest Battlefield titles coming out of DICE, is ready and able to run in DirectX 11. Johan Anderson, rendering architect for DICE, said that the process took only about three hours to port DirectX 10 code to DirectX 11 compatible code.
At the beginning of the porting progress the developer had to face a cross platform engine (PC, Xbox 360, PS3) with an exclusive DirectX 10 rendering path that had DX 10.0 and DX 10.1 features. The actual port of the Engine from DirectX 10 to DirectX 11 was done in three hours said Anderson. Searching and replacing the relevant parts inside the code required the most time.
Since currently there is no DirectX 11 hardware or appropriate development software, the Frostbite Engine was equipped with a switch inside the compiler that can be changed to DirectX 10 or DirectX 11. The developers at DICE are certain that the CPU load during API calls can be reduced noticeably with DirectX 11 drivers. Among other things the Frostbite DirectX 11 Engine offers HDR texture compression, Compute Shader and hardware tessellation for characters and terrain.
The final release of DirectX 11 has not yet been announced, but preview builds started to be released late in 2008.
Since currently there is no DirectX 11 hardware or appropriate development software, the Frostbite Engine was equipped with a switch inside the compiler that can be changed to DirectX 10 or DirectX 11. The developers at DICE are certain that the CPU load during API calls can be reduced noticeably with DirectX 11 drivers. Among other things the Frostbite DirectX 11 Engine offers HDR texture compression, Compute Shader and hardware tessellation for characters and terrain.