Demos of DirectX 11 on the new Radeon HD 5800 series

AMD Developer Central has some new demos which show off the Radeon HD 5800 series cards and DirectX 11. 

The Mecha demo shows the results of a new approach to rendering semi-transparent objects without pre-sorting, known as order-independent transparency (OIT).  Blending is an order-dependent operation that requires sorting objects before rendering them. Atomic operations and append buffers make it possible to construct per-pixel fragment lists and sort them on the GPU. The results are a significant increase in speed and accuracy over those possible with traditional techniques.

The Ladybug demo shows the results of a new approach to simulating lens-accurate depth-of-field effects based on real-world parameters of focal length and focus distance using Direct Compute 11. Depth-of-field is used in feature films by cinematographers to subtly guide a viewer’s attention through a shot or to heighten the emotion of a scene. This technique finally provides developers with a way to achieve the same effects and bring new levels of cinematic realism to their games. This approach is enabled by features such as atomic operations and shared memory.