Richard Huddy, Senior. Manager Developer Relations at AMD recently blogged about Why we should get excited about DirectX 11. It’s an excellent post on how DirectX 11 will improve graphics for us. He talks about tessellation, GPGPUs and the efficiency of DirectX 11 with multi-core CPUs. But the most interesting part of his blog post, which should really come as good news for all gamers and hardware enthusiasts is the following snippet:
Quite often you get to hear rather bland but optimistic statements about the future versions of DirectX. “It’ll be faster and better” – but you don’t get to hear much in the way of substantial justification.
This time around I hope it’s abundantly clear – I predict that:
- We’ll see higher frame rates because the way DirectX 11 uses CPUs will be more efficient.
- We’ll see higher frame rates because games developers will be able to use our GPUs more like CPUs.
- We’ll see smoother, more realistic characters and more realistic terrain as we move away from blocky polygonal representations to the kind that are used in movies.
- And a side-benefit, that will help PC gaming generally, is that the new version is easier to use, so it will help to keep game development costs down.
Higher frame rates, better performance, more realistic graphics and low development costs. What else would you desire from a new version of DirectX ? There’s no DirectX 11 hardware out yet, but AMD will probably be the first as they have announced their plans and Nvidia hasn’t. DirectX 11 surely seems to be geared to change more than just gaming graphics. It’ll have a major impact on daily computing as well.
