AMD Shows Off DirectX 11 GPU

June 4, 2009 | 04:25

Tags: #11 #40nm #computex-2009 #directx #rv870 #wafer

Companies: #amd #microsoft #tsmc

COMPUTEX 2009: Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President of AMD today announced its upcoming DirectX 11 GPU that will arrive with Windows 7. Working with TSMC, it will be based on the current 40nm process, and Dr. John Wei, Senior Director of Advanced Technology Marketing, produced a full 40nm ATI DX11 wafer for all to see. There was no indication whether this was the elusive RV870 or another, as yet unannounced product. Shots taken at the event show it gave its codename as "Evergreen."

Rick laughed, taking away the wafer to stop us hacks taking photos and saying that he needed to take the wafer to make DX11 products - whether a joke or the sad truth, we're not actually sure considering the yield of TSMC 40nm parts.

Next, AMD showed off the DirectX 11 SDK which includes support for tessellation – a technique ATI has supported in its hardware since its Radeon HD 2900 XT (R600) GPU. In addition, DX11 includes new HDR compression technologies, computer shaders for graphics and general computing and better multithreading support for CPUs. In a blog post, AMD's Richard Huddy, said that tessellation and other improvements in DX11 will mean higher framerates than seen previously.

At the Computex event, AMD was specifically keen to push tessellation technology and show how it dynamically increases the polygon count with specific hardware inside the GPU, meanwhile without impacting on performance. With DirectX 11, having had hardware support for tessellation for years, AMD finally can have its day on the PC and should be in good stead with over 4-5 years of tessellation development.

DirectX 11 also brings compute shader 5.0 to the table, and Rick explained that software like Folding@Home (specifically mentioned) will benefit from having a uniform base to code for; a subtle jab at Nvidia’s CUDA no doubt.

AMD Shows Off DirectX 11 GPU AMD shows off Direct X 11 AMD Shows Off DirectX 11 GPU AMD shows off Direct X 11

AMD Shows Off DirectX 11 GPU AMD shows off Direct X 11

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