AMD delivers DirectX 11 without Microsoft
As mentioned earlier DirectX 11 is AMD’s most important PR feature of the Radeon HD 5000 family and the fact is that it can deliver a complete DirectX 11 architecture even before Microsoft supports it with its operating systems. Windows 7 will launch on October 22nd and at the same time we expect a DirectX 11 update for Windows Vista. The only thing missing is games supporting the new standard, where a handful of titles are expected to appear before the end of the year. As usual it will take a couple of months before AMD’s DirectX 11 support will come to real use.
What is DirectX 11 and what does it mean to the consumers? If we are to believe all the marketing talk you will get the picture that DX11 is the greatest thing since the introduction of the first 3D accelerators, which is of course far from the truth. But as a new programming interface for 3D graphics it opens up new possibilities for game developers which will bring new and cooler effects and hopefully better performance in DirectX 11 games.
There are many bits of news in DirectX 11 and among these we have Shader Model 5.0, and buried under these technologies there is a myriad of large and small news compared to DirectX 10.1. We have neither time or possibility to go into detail on all of this, but Microsoft claims that DirectX11 and Direct3D 11 focus on performance scalability with the graphics circuits.
We have been promised better performance at nearly every DirectX update without any real practical gains but we hope learn more with time. Without doing a real deep dive into DirectX 11 we will look closer at some of the more interesting bits of the DirectX 11 API, and how we may benefit from them in games.
