DirectX 11 explained

As gamers, we often hear about DirectX 11, but do you really know what that means? Icrontic explains in depth what this technology means for gamers and enthusiasts alike.

[ChickeyCantor]

I like how DirectX is still growing.
Especially the part how it makes use of multithreading( although just now?)

[Pandamobile]

*Improvements in multithreading.

DX10 already supported hundreds of stream processors. Compute shaders just take it to the next level.

[TheIneffableBob]

The multithreading improvements deal with the CPU.

[Kakkoii]

Yeah, as Bob said. It's talking about the CPU in that case. There's also improvements in the communication between the CPU and GPU.

[Pandamobile]

Ooh. I thought it was just with the streamies. But yeah, that's good too. I wonder if it'll cut down on system RAM usage too. Crysis in DX9 mode uses 1.5 GB of RAM and in DX10 it uses under 1 GB.

[Kakkoii]

Yeah it should cut down on RAM usage quite a bit in games that take advantage of the new texture compression algorithm's it employs. And also at the same time RAM is becoming cheaper. The default RAM amount's on ATI's new 5870 is going to be 1GB/2GB.

[fossilfern]

I miss OpenGL :(

But they ruined it for themselves, ack well i get to play games thats all im concerned about :D

[sukru]

id software was the last big shop that was OpenGL centric (thus providing us with Linux ports of their games), but in one of the latest interviews, Carmack told they might not port id tech 5 (Rage) to Linux at this time.

This is sad.

[Major_Tom]

It's sad state of affairs isn't it. There used to be a time where the most updated version of OPENGL was mandatory.

Pew pew, Microsoft.

[Nihilism]

there's no mention of any dx11 features running on dx10 hardware, i remember reading that some of the dx11 would run in dx10 hardware, they lied!

[Pandamobile]

No, I as far as I know, DX10 cards will still be able to do most of the stuff the DX11 cards can, just significantly slower because they're not designed to do it.

[Kakkoii]

DirectCompute should work on all DX10 cards. As it works by using the programmable shaders that have been on the cards for a few generations now. But I could be wrong, there may have been some architecture tweak needed for it to work on both NV/ATI programmable shaders.

It's mainly the CPU side improvements that people with DX10 cards should be able to take advantage of. As that part is separate from the GPU. It's more of an OS improvement.

But Tessellation and the new texture compression won't be available to DX10 cards.