As most were well aware they would, Microsoft took the opportunity that Gamefest offered them to announce DirectX 11.  They talked about the CPU becoming a general purpose GPU, sort of like AMD and nVIDIA have been touting for years now.  The Inquirer even heard them bring up that paradigm word.  About the only thing new that came out of the announcement was a promise to make DX11 run on DX10 equipment, so that you won’t have to buy new hardware.  Of course, if you are even slightly exited about DX11, there is almost no chance you will be using the same video by the time DX11 is released.


“MICROSOFT officially announced DirectX 11 during its Volish Gamefest 2008 developer conference in Seattle, Washington.

The latest Microsoft multimedia API package will include improved multi-threading capabilities, hardware-based tesselation and new shader technology that re-positions GPUs as general-purpose parallel processors [cough!].

Microsoft CTO Chris Satchell explained that the company wanted “to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders.”

The Vole has also graciously decided not to force users to purchase DX11-specific hardware. Satchell readily admitted that Microsoft had deliberately created a discontinuity between DX10 and DX9, but emphasized that “DX11 is totally compatible with DX10.”

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