14 DAY TRIAL // By the end of this month, Microsoft will give not just a taste of the evolution of its graphics technology by an entire DirectX 11 feast. While so far the Redmond giant has served nothing but crumbs of the successor of DirectX 10.1, the situation will change on July 22-23, and the GameFest 2008 Microsoft Game Technology Conference. The events agenda is virtually packed with talk that will focus on DirectX 11.
"The graphics track has everything you need to get the most out of your high-performance graphics engine. Join us as we cover exciting new ground, including the lowdown on the upcoming Direct3D 11 API set. We also cover the recent improvements to PIX (for both Xbox 360 and Windows), giving you tips to help eke out every last cycle of performance. And finally, we share never-before-seen details on the inner workings of the Xbox 360 GPU," Microsoft revealed.
On the menu, there is no less than an "Introduction to the Direct3D 11 Graphics Pipeline," along with presentations involving "Direct3D 11 Tessellation," "Direct3D 11 Compute Shader - More Generality for Advanced Techniques," "High Level Shader Language (HLSL) Update - Introducing Version 5.0," "Water-Tight, Textured, Displaced Subdivision Surface Tessellation Using Direct3D 11," and "Advanced Topics in GPU Tessellation".
According to Microsoft, Direct3D 11 is designed to go well beyond what Direct3D 10 is capable of offering - new hardware application programming interfaces. With DirectX 11, developers and designers will be able to put together content which will adapt seamlessly to both low-and high-resolution displays and which will play well with a variety of configurations involving different CPUs and GPUs. However, by far the largest enhancement seems to be related to Tessellation.
"Direct3D 11 contains new programmable and fixed function stages designed to enable powerful, flexible tessellation approaches at interactive frame rates in games and modeling applications," reads the description of the Direct3D 11 Tessellation talk. Additional presentations will focus on GPU tessellation rendering techniques as well as techniques for "tessellating displacement mapped subdivision surfaces" via the Direct3D 11 pipeline.
The Redmond company will also be gearing up developers for what it referred to as an update to the world's top "data-parallel programming language". In this regard, DirectX 11 will bring with it version 5.0 of the High Level Shader Language. The HLSL update is set up to introduce support for everything from polymorphism to Dynamic Shader Linkage, but also for interfaces and objects.
"The Direct3D API imposes some constraints on the processing model in order to achieve optimal rendering performance. Direct3D 11 introduces the Compute Shader as a way to access this computational capability without so many constraints. It opens the door to operations on more general data-structures than just arrays, and to new classes of algorithms as well. Key features include: communication of data between threads, and a rich set of primitives for random access and streaming I/O operations. These features enable faster and simpler implementations of techniques already in use, such as imaging and post-processing effects, and also open up new techniques that become feasible on Direct3D 11-class hardware," Microsoft added.