What DirectX 11 Will Bring to the Table

It took a little while before DirectX 10 games hit the market, but now there is at least 20 different titles that are either native DX10 or at least support it. The most notable might be Crysis, although games like Call of Juarez, Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War (pictured below) and Lost Planet put it to the best use. The real benefits of DX10 might be seen when certain titles like Alan Wake and Crysis Warhead hit the market though… not to mention STALKER: Clear Sky. The next year in gaming is sure to be pretty…

What about DirectX 11? Microsoft formally announced the new API at their Gamefest conference in Seattle this past July, but what does it mean to developers, or gamers? According to Elite Bastards, it means a lot of things, and from what they’ve found out, Microsoft is really pushing forth an effort to make sure their upcoming API is well-received. Microsoft even goes as far as saying the best way to prepare for DX11 is to code with DX10 and 10.1, now. Not much will change from the code base scheme of things, it seems.

One of the biggest new features for DX11 might be multi-threading support, allowing developers to begin taking full advantage of multi-core CPUs (or so we can hope). Another major feature is GPGPU support, which is good given the sheer amount of effort both Intel and NVIDIA are placing on using your GPU in non-gaming situations. In short, DX11 looks promising, and it might be one of the biggest single changes our GPUs have experienced in a while, at least on the software side.

These coding changes will also be reflected in an updated version of the DirectX HLSL (High Level Shading Language) used to write shaders and DirectX code. As we can see above, it appears that the general target for DirectX 11’s Compute Shader is still going to be the manipulation of graphics and media data, which as I mentioned previously suggests it won’t quite be invading on CUDA territory this time around by providing a complete coding structure geared towards creating an application of any kind in HLSL.