14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's next iteration of DirectX is bound to be situated at the forefront of the general purpose graphics processing (GPGPU) revolution, according to the Redmond company. The software giant has been extremely shy of revealing details about the successor of DirectX 10 directly to the general public. At its recent GameFest conference, Microsoft did give a taste of DirectX 11 to developers, but the official channels of communication remain silent as far as consumers are concerned. However, this is not stopping the DirectX developer from applauding the revolution synonymous with version 11 via ADM.
"Just as it ushered in the era of advanced 3-D gaming for the masses, DirectX is poised to be at the vanguard of the GPGPU revolution," stated Anantha Kancherla, manager of Windows desktop and graphics technologies, Microsoft. Kancherla offered the Redmond company's perspective as response to an announcement from AMD that the Stream Software Development Kit (SDK) would be getting full DirectX 11 support over the next 18 months.
This timetable pushes the DirectX 11 Stream SDK support into the beginning of 2010, a time when Windows 7, the successor of Windows Vista, is scheduled to drop. This, only if Microsoft doesn't beat all odds and releases the operating system by the end of 2009.
"DirectX 11 gives developers the power to more easily harness the astonishing capabilities of AMD GPUs for general purpose computation, and gives consumers an effortless way to experience all that AMD Stream has to offer, on the hundreds of millions of Microsoft Windows powered systems worldwide," Kancherla added.
At GameFest, Microsoft introduced Direct3D 11 Tessellation, the Direct3D 11 Graphics Pipeline, High Level Shader Language (HLSL) Update Version 5.0, and additional details about the graphics technology aimed exclusively at developers. Windows Vista caused extreme pain to its customers as far as DirectX 10 was concerned, first because of the lack of backward compatibility with Windows XP, and secondly because the poor hardware support from the main graphics cards manufacturers. However, DirectX 11 will be available for both Vista and Windows 7, with a promise that compatibility with existing hardware will be guaranteed.
Furthermore, it looks like Microsoft is keeping not only customers, but also partners in the dark as to DirectX 11, since AMD had to speculate on the future of the technology. "DirectX 11 is expected to build upon the already outstanding performance of DirectX 10.1 for 3-D graphics rendering and gaming control. It is also being designed to introduce a host of new technologies aimed at making it easier for programmers to create general purpose graphics processing (GPGPU) accelerated applications that can run on any Windows Vista powered platform," reads a fragment of AMD's message.