Today, at Gamefest 2008, Microsoft has announced DirectX 11 and will disclose their plans for the platform to game developers.
Don't go tossing your DirectX 10 card just yet, however. DX11 will be compatible with all DX10 cards, but there will be some specific, unannounced features that will require a new card.
DX11 will release with the next version of Windows and be released for Vista at that time. You've still got plenty of DX10 gaming left.
Hit the jump for the new announced features of DX11.
- Full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows
- Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
- New compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
- Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines
- Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close
