Rumour control: Nvidia to add DirectX 10.1 support in 2009

Posted at: 11:32am 4th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Leaked roadmap shows that Nvidia won’t be supporting DirectX 10.1 until it launches its next generation of GPUs, although GDDR5 support could come this year

While ATI was quick to jump onto the DirectX 10.1 bandwagon with the Radeon HD 3000 series of GPUs last year, Nvidia still doesn’t think it warrants looking at for now. In fact, according to a leaked presentation slide, the dominant beast of desktop PC graphics has no plans to introduce DirectX 10.1 support until next year.

The guys over at TG Daily claim to have seen a leaked roadmap (but haven’t published it to protect their source), which shows that DirectX 10.1 support isn’t planned until the next generation of GPUs, which will either be in late 2008 or early 2009. As well as this, the site also claims that Nvidia will be adding support for GDDR5 memory by the end of this year.

Although DirectX 10.1 promises a lot of new features, including virtual ray tracing through Global Illumination, as well as standardised anti-aliasing patterns, the industry has yet to fully embrace it. So far, Assassin’s Creed is the only game that’s supported it, although the DirectX 10.1 features were later removed via a patch. Diablo III is also rumoured to support DirectX 10.1, although this hasn’t been officially confirmed yet.

Both ATI and S3 have released DirectX 10.1 graphics chips so far, but without game support it’s nothing but an extra tick-box with no practical use. However, once Nvidia is onboard, we’re likely to see much more in the way of games that use DirectX 10.1. Is DirectX 10.1 an important factor in your decision making process when buying a graphics card? Let us know in the comments section below.