Hey everyone,
We have just launched a massive competition where you have the chance to win a grand prize of $10,000 and a trip to Unite 2013, all by just showing off!
Create something jaw droppingly amazing in Unity 4 using DirectX 11 and submit it to use on or before the 16th of January 2013 for a chance to win.
Go to our competition site for more details http://unity3d.com/contest/dx11
Good Luck!
This is great! Finally! I’m very excited to see what comes out of this. Really good move UT, this is whats been needed for a long time. Good luck everyone who enters
Can you clarify this:
Does that mean the models I use have to be redistributable as usable assets or just in game format? Makes HUGE difference to me.
Hmm interesting. To use DX11 features though doesn’t that basically mean you need to be an expert programmer, able to make stuff like geometry shaders? I’m a DX11 newbie 
My complaint: … I really wish there was a competition that had put every contestant on equal footing - ie you cannot form a team - must be solo - must not use existing projects or assets or scripts ie must start from scratch - cannot use asset-store assets, etc… otherwise there are usually big teams and pre-started projects that have a huge leg-up on the rest of us. … I know that overall this competition is useful to Unity, providing them with a lot of cool content and community involvement and promotion of Unity itself, but from the perspective of us actual community persons, I wish there was a contest that saw things from our perspective.
@imaginaryH I would think unity has plenty of beginner-average users and as you stated , the purpose of such a competition is to attract more exceptional programmers for all the obvious business reasons.
I think this is a great idea. I’m looking forward to what the community creates! Not sure if I’ll have time to enter myself, but I’m still looking forward to some awesome demos.
Is dx11 only for pro licences?
No you can enter with Unity Free so long as it’s version 4
Does unity 4 come with some directx 11 effects built in?
How do you know your using directx 11 in unity 4 unless you write some shaders that use it directly?
That’s all fine and dandy.
However, it excludes every developer on a Mac, since DX11 is Windows only… Not the best move. Especially if you take into account that Unity has it’s roots as Mac software.
This is also what I was thinking. This contest excludes all Mac users unless they want to dual boot into Windows.
I think the competition is part funded by driectx, I’m sure if apple part funded a competition to make something for unity mac then I’m sure unity would run that.
Can you tell us what kind of D3D11 hardware you’ll be judging on? There’s a lot of cards that technically support D3D11 but knowing how high-end you’ll go is a big deal when deciding polycount etc…
This is from the Unity 4 manual:
Using DirectX 11 in Unity 4
Unity 4 introduces ability to use DirectX 11 graphics API, with all the goodies that you expect from it: compute shaders, tessellation shaders, shader model 5.0 and so on.
Enabling DirectX 11
To enable DirectX 11 for your game builds and the editor, set “Use DX11” option in Player Settings. Unity editor needs to be restarted for this to take effect.
Note that DX11 requires Windows Vista or later and at least a DX10-level GPU (preferably DX11-level). Unity editor window title has “” at the end when it is actually running in DX11 mode.
Image Effects that can take advantage of DX11
Depth of Field effect (optimized Bokeh texture splatting)
Noise and Grain effect (higher quality noise patterns)
Motion Blur effect (higher quality reconstruction filter)
Compute Shaders
Compute shaders allow using GPU as a massively parallel processor. See Compute Shaders page for mode details.
Tessellation Geometry Shaders
Surface shaders have support for simple tessellation displacement, see Surface Shader Tessellation page.
So the only major built-in DX11 effects are Depth of Field, Noise Grain, and Motion Blur. You can also fairly easily add Phong Tesselation or tesselated Displacement Mapping to a built-in shader using one or two lines of code. So I think if you’re not a shader programmer, you’d want to focus on really detailed models by using ZBrush or something and exporting dispacement maps to put on top of a low poly model, then render them with tesselation and a bunch of cool Image Effects on top.
If you are a shader programmer, there’s a ton of stuff you could do with arbitrary Compute Shaders, and probably some cool tricks you can do with the built in tesselation support in surface shaders.
Welp, looks like I’m already disqualified. I have a DirectX 10.1 graphics card.
I am most certainly going to enter this.
Who cares about the $10,000 or the trip to Unite 2013, I just want an excuse to play around with DirectX 11 and Unity 4 
You can get older DX11 cards for as low as $30 if you want to upgrade:
Redistributable in the end result.
@imaginaryhuman I know what you mean and all those things had been taken into account, there is a limit to 8 persons per team in the terms and conditions. But in a contest that is run on the internet, it impossible to regulate the exact amount of people who worked on something, find the source to every model and snippet of script.
In an ideal world, I’d have lots of tiny robots to do all that for us but that would never happen. At least this way (hopefully) team members and assets are credited. Whatever things don’t work out during this comp, we can use to improve upon next time, thanks for the feedback.
@nipoco We realise this, but this won’t be our first and last comp so don’t worry about that.
If your PC can run it smoothly, so can ours we have a few artists with beefy PC’s so when organising this comp, that wasn’t a concern.