More details on DirectX 11

Microsoft has released more details on DirectX 11 -an expansion to the current DX10.1 that comes with Vista SP1- during the XNA  Gamefest in Seattle. The new DX11 version of the software should not only function on Vista, but also be future-proof for Windows 7 and 7.5, Vista's successors. The biggest improvements that come with the new DirectX standard are the better support for multi-core CPU's and the enhanced support for GPGPU applications. There's plenty of room for improvement left in the area of multi-core processors, seeing as most games don't use more than two cores properly. 

Tesselation is also fully implemented with the new DirectX version, making images even more realistic. The tesselator is already present in recent ATI graphics cards, but couldn't be used by game developers until the DX10.1 update. 

No explicit support of Ray-tracing has been mentioned, but it was shown earlier that older graphics cards can also perform ray-tracing through the DX9 API. DirectX 11 should also be backwards compatible with the current DX10.0 and DX10.1 standards and should work on all recent ATI and nVidia cards through software updates. 

Tags: vista gpgpu

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