DirectX 11 to be revealed this month

Posted at: 3:03pm 10th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

The next version of Direct3D adds a Compute Shader to the pipeline, and will be unveiled at Gamefest 2008

With the exception of a brief appearance in Assassin’s Creed, we’ve yet to see a game that really takes advantage of DirectX 10.1, but Microsoft already plans to show off its next 3D API, Direct3D 11, at Gamefest 2008 this month.

Gamefest is Microsoft’s gaming technology conference, and it takes place on 22 and 23 July in Seattle, Washington. According to the conference’s schedule, several talks are planned about Direct3D 11, covering the new graphics pipeline, tessellation, HLSL (high level shading language) 5.0 and, perhaps most significantly, the new Compute Shader.

We first heard about the Compute Shader back in November 2007, where our source from the graphics business revealed that it was a way of accessing the horsepower of a GPU without having to go through a graphics API. At the time, they also said that it would be ‘the more likely route that games developers will go down for physics, but that was before Nvidia had bought Ageia.

Microsoft has already spilled a few details about the Compute Shader on the Gamefest site, saying that it ‘opens the door to operations on more general data-structures than just arrays, and to new classes of algorithms as well.’ According to the Gamefest site, key features of the Compute Shader include ‘communication of data between threads, and a rich set of primitives for random access and streaming I/O operations.’ The site claims that this could speed up imaging and post-processing effects, while also opening up ‘new techniques’ to Direct3D 11 hardware.

As well as this, the site also gives a few details about how Direct3D 11 will handle tessellation, saying that the API ‘contains new programmable and fixed function stages designed to enable powerful, flexible tessellation approaches at interactive frame rates in games.’ Meanwhile, HLSL 5.0 is promised to bring ‘support for Dynamic Shader Linkage.’

Of course, this is a gaming tech conference, rather than an official launch, and it’s likely to be a fair while before Direct3D 11 is fully released. However, the Compute Shader is now official, and we’re likely to know more about the forthcoming graphics API after Gamefest 2008.