14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just started talking about the successor of DirectX 10 and is, of course, far from having revealed all the details. In fact, the Redmond company has some surprises cooking that it failed to bring to the table in its discussion with the developing community at GameFest 2008. With the evolution towards Windows 7 and DirectX 11, Microsoft will not repeat the frustrating scenario of Windows Vista, DirectX 10 and Windows XP. That is to say, DirectX 11 will be backported to earlier Windows versions, but just to one, namely Vista. XP, now with Service Pack 3 (SP3), continues to be left out of the DirectX's growth equation. And so will all Windows operating systems prior to Windows Vista.
At the GameFest conference last week, Microsoft made it clear that the discontinuity between DirectX 9 and 10 would not be repeated with versions 10 and 11. One important aspect in this regard is that DirectX 10 hardware will continue to be supported even with DirectX 11, as Windows 7 will also continue to be compatible with the products designed to play well with Windows Vista.
"DirectX 11 will have better compatibility with DirectX 10 hardware than most expected. What does that mean? Yes, there is some confusion over the '11 running on 10 hw' part of the announcement," revealed Microsoft's Phil Taylor. "There are parts of the new API that are hardware independent, those can indeed run downlevel. The mult-threaded resource handling, for instance, can be enabled to run on DirectX 10 class hardware if the IHVs (ATI, Intel, nVidia) update their DirectX 10 drivers. Think of that part of it as '11 on 10'. Then there are parts of the new API that do require new hardware support and will only run on DX11 class hardware. The hardware tesselator and Shader Model 5.0 are examples of those parts."
Also at GameFest, Microsoft gave a taste of the upcoming Direct3D 11 application programming interface set, focusing on support for Tessellation, the Compute Shader, and new High Level Shader Language features, among others. But, according to Taylor, Microsoft still has some features tucked away, not ready for release just yet.
"This makes it clear that Microsoft has not 'forgotten' PC gaming; which some critics seem to think. Which is a very good thing," he said. "There are a couple of things for developers not disclosed in these releases, and when the DirectX 11 SDK comes out I think developers will be pleasantly surprised." (emphasis added)