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Satchell: DirectX 11 Won't Have 'DX9/10 Discontinuity'
by Chris Remo, Christian Nutt
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July 22, 2008
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During its Gamefest 2008 developer conference in Seattle, Microsoft officially announced DirectX 11, the newest version of its multimedia API package. Like its predecessor DirectX 10, it will be exclusive to Windows Vista "as well as future versions of Windows."
Features include new shader technology that begins to allow developers to position GPUs as more general-purpose parallel processors, rather than being dedicated solely to graphics processing; better multi-threading capabilities; and hardware-based tesselation.
Said newly promoted Microsoft's Entertainment Business Division CTO Chris Satchell during a Gamefest keynote, "We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders."
DirectX 10, which was first released in 2006, required DX10-specific hardware, creating a clearly-defined split between it and DX9. "We created a discontinuity; that was deliberate," Satchell said during his address, but DX11 will be compatible with DX10 hardware.
"DX11 is totally compatible with DX10. There's not that 9/10 discontinuity we created before," he said.
On the state of the PC hardware switch from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture, Satchell noted that software has been the limiting factor. "We've been shipping 64-bit CPUs on the hardware side for awhile," he pointed out. "We're not at the point where the 64-bit OS is catching up. I think we are [there] in the next six to eight months." Satchell did not specify Windows platforms when referring to 64-bit systems.
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OK. Then it will fail as DX10 has. Microsoft can keep hitting their heads on the wall as long as they want for all I care.
I don't think MSFT is hitting their head on the wall, they chose to limit DX10 to vista as another incentive toadopt the new platform. But additionally there are a lot of core changes between DX10 and 9c. Specifically dealing with how to sample values in the frame buffer.
This mandated a change in architecture in the GPU as well as the WWDM.
from the sounds of it, DX11 is going to be along the lines of DX7>8>9 where its building upon the foundation of the new WWDM and GPU model.
It will be interesting to see how Nvidia will use this tech with their acquired rights to Ageia PhysX.
Wait, who cares?
whats 10.1 good for then?
Ok, _that_ is a valid reason. However, I think the wording is unfortunate in his quote. Just like every other revision of DX one should expect to have to buy new hardware to support the new features. When I read what he said, the context says to me that DX11 will run on DX10 hardware like DX9 will run on DX8 hardware. If you want all the new function calls supported, then just like every other revision of DX then you will have to buy the card that has the HW support for it.