If you’re planning to put down some cash for a new GPU, you might want to wait. At COMPUTEX, AMD announced that it plans to deliver DirectX 11 GPUs to support Windows 7 later this year, ahead of the competition.
DirectX 11 brings with it three major improvements to the DirectX API:
Tessellation - Allows higher definition 3D models to be created.
Compute Shader - Parallel processing capability
Improved multithreading - Better support for multi-core CPUs
Rick Bergman, senior vice president of AMD’s products group called DirectX 11 “the biggest inflection point in graphics in 10 years.”
The new GPUs will be based on 40nm fabrication technology and produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
What all this means is that it’s now a bad time to spend much money on a GPU, certainly a high-end one. While DirectX11 is backward compatible, I expect that there will be a performance overhead similar to that you see with DirectX10.1 running on DirectX10 hardware.
Check out these cool DirectX 11 demos caught over at COMPUTEX (via HEXUS):
No comments:
Post a Comment