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DX11 coming in 2009


PurSuiT

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ATI: Expect DirectX 11 and 40 nm GPUs in 2009

 

DX11 is expected to bring several substantial advancements over DX10, including the introduction of Shader Model 5.0, as well as GPGPU support and multithreading support, both of which are essential for the graphics industry and the myriad of multi-core graphics cards that exist today. Also, hardware tessellation will be supported by DX11.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ati-dx11-40nm-gpu,6462.html

 

Good times ahead for Vista and Windows 7 users with DX11

 

You will still need to have Vista as the minimum OS, the package is being released with the next iteration of Windows – Windows 7 – and so will be compatible across both platforms. It's also going to be compatible across the hardware spectrum as well, working with DX10 and DX10.1 specced graphics cards, as well as the new SM5 cards to come.

 

Originally, Direct3D was focused on performing on a single-core CPU, making the multi-threading support fairly limited. DX11, though, has been designed to more effectively drive the graphics card, using a system with a multi-core CPU at its heart. One of the ways it does this is by supporting multiple rendering contexts.

 

The main computational work occurs in the primary immediate context. This dictates the timeline for work being submitted to the GPU; running alongside this are the new optional deferred contexts. These are developer-created and enables work associated with each deferred context to be carried out on a separate thread/core, then submitted to the GPU once it's ready for a new task. This is one of those backwards compatible features and so will benefit existing hardware, and should finally make quad-core CPUs more desirable for gamers beyond the willy-waving.

 

There's also a big change in the render pipeline, too, adding in three new stages: the hull shader, tessellator and domain shader. Listening to developers Microsoft has identified character models and animation as a key battleground in the graphics front.

 

Another boon for the memory consumption of today's games is the improvements in texture compression. The DX11 API gives developers two new compression formats to help with high-quality real-time rendering without sacrificing performance.

 

There are a host of other new features to the DX11 set, such as Shader Model 5 and Dynamic Shader Linkage, but the latter offers a taste of why DX11 should be the API to move people away from DX9 gaming that DX10 promised to be.

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/ev...rectx-11-475655

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