Is DirectX 11 an Unfair Advantage?

[Bruce Normann]

There's been some discussion about the use of SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Space_Ambient_Occlusion)) in the BattleForge benchmark. Enabling it gives newer ATI cards a significant advantage, and I was under the impression that it was primarily a DX11 thing, and that it was unfair to use it in benchmarking, kind of like PhysX. Well, after looking a little further, I don't thinks it's all that unfair, here's why:

I found this about NVIDIA and Ambient Occlusion.
They say it's been in their driver since Release 185...
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_ambientocclusion_home.html


AMD says Accellerated SSAO was in DirectX 10.1
In addition to providing image quality enhancements such as transparency anti-aliasing, DirectX®10.1 provides exclusive performance optimizations through accelerated shadow map sampling, accelerated SSAO, and accelerated Gaussian shadows. In some cases, these performance improvements can provide a 20%+ performance boost when compared to running the same application in DirectX® 10.
http://game.amd.com/us-en/unlock_directx.aspx (http://game.amd.com/us-en/unlock_directx.aspx)

So, HOW FAR are NVIDIA behind AMD...?
And using SSAO is unfair, how...?

[Olin Coles]

To be clear, enabling SSAO doesn't give anyone an advantage... just like enabling AA or AF doesn't. It simply demands a level of technology that is either there, or it isn't. It just so happens that ATI has an entire series of new GPUs which can deliver the technology that SSAO demands, and it does a better job than what NVIDIA offers.

[Olle P]

"So, HOW FAR are NVIDIA behind AMD...?"

At least Nvidia has now released a series of cards that support DX10.1.
Too bad (for Nvidia) that those cards are at the bottom end of performance and way overpriced in their retail versions.

/Olle