Nvidia seems to finally give us an answer to whether it will make its next generation graphics cards DirectX 10.1 ready or not. The company simply says no to this only because it plans to jump over ATI's DirectX 10.1 and go straight to DirectX 11. Also, its latest PhysX drivers, believed to cheat on 3DMark Vantage results, seem to be overwriting DLLs on the same test.

Next year is supposed to bring us DirectX 11, and Nvidia plans to work hard in this direction. Having TWIMTBP, Nvidia is able to get close enough to make friendships with developers and publishers, and, since the Santa Clara does not support DirectX 10.1, these guys simply won't go near it as well.

The 55nm Geforce GTX 280 graphics is surely to be DirectX 10, and only the next generation graphics boards will be DirectX 11. Hopefully, this will be the final word in this chapter, though rumors will surely go on.

As for ATI's part in the deal, the next generation Radeon, which may be called R8x0 as well, will bring the support for DirectX 11, too. We expect to see these brought to life next year, before Windows 7 makes its way on the market.

The controversy around Nvidia's PhysX drivers seems to go further on, as Vr-Zone published a short article according to which they make changes in the DDL files within DMark Vantage. The PhisX driver is supposed to write new files over the original ones. The result is that the PPU will stop working, and the workload will be offloaded to the GPU. That is if a PhysX capable graphics card, like GF9/GTX 200, is installed. Nothing surprising here, but the problems appear when a Radeon card is installed, as the PPU cannot be put back to work. The original DDLs will still remain overwritten.