AMD Demonstrates World?s First Microsoft DirectX 11 Graphics Processor

[Gambit]

AMD Demonstrates World?s First Microsoft DirectX 11 Graphics Processor
Wednesday, June 3 2009

At a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan today, AMD publicly demonstrated the world?s first Microsoft DirectX 11 graphics processor. The series of demonstrations shed new light on the significantly improved computing experience set to debut at the end of 2009. The fusion of AMD?s new ground-breaking graphics processors with the forthcoming DirectX 11 programming interface is set to forever change both applications and PC gaming for the better. To illustrate, AMD showed numerous examples of faster application performance and new game features using the world?s first true DirectX 11 graphics processor.

* Get ready for a revolution: Games and other applications are about to get a lot better as a result of AMD?s new graphics hardware and DirectX 11. DirectX 11 features such as tessellation will bring consumers higher quality, superior performing games making use of 6th generation AMD technology. Another DirectX 11 feature, the compute shader, will enable AMD?s DirectX 11 graphics cards to help make Windows 7 run faster in a wide number of applications and in a manner that?s completely transparent to users, for example, in seamlessly accelerating the conversion of video for playback on portable media players through a drag-and-drop interface.
* DirectX 11 done right on AMD: The development of DirectX 11 has been broadly influenced by AMD graphics technology. Each new version of DirectX builds on the versions that came before it, and many of the capabilities of DirectX 11 were pioneered on AMD GPUs, including DirectX 10.1, tessellation, compute shaders, Fetch4, custom filter anti-aliasing and high-definition ambient occlusion shading.
* Bringing consumers DirectX 11 sooner: The preview of the world?s first DirectX 11 graphics processor at Computex 2009 validates AMD?s commitment to delivering leading technologies to market before anyone else, and to continuing to foster innovation in computing.
* Fueling developer demand: It?s not just consumers who are excited about the prospects of DirectX 11, game developers are also incredibly enthusiastic about taking advantage of new DirectX 11 hardware to bring even better games to market, in large part due to AMD?s readiness to meet their DirectX 11 needs. Many developers have indicated their commitment to building DirectX 11 games initially on AMD?s DirectX 11 hardware, delivering superior performance and compatibility.

?AMD has a long track record of delivering pioneering features that have gone on to become mainstays in the DirectX experience, and we?re doing it again with two mature, AMD-developed technologies in DirectX 11 ? tessellation and the compute shader ? both of which enable a better DirectX 11 experience for consumers,? said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President, AMD Products Group. ?Today, we?re previewing AMD?s DirectX 11 graphics processor to build enthusiasm for this key technology so developers will have games available at launch and shortly thereafter. With the benefits it delivers to gaming, applications and Windows 7, developers are lining up to get their hands on our hardware, and we?re confident that consumers will too.?

techpowerup.com (http://www.techpowerup.com/95957/AMD_Demonstrates_World%E2%80%99s_First_Microsoft_D irectX_11_Graphics_Processor.html)

[@@GJC@@]

I think people should wait for the DX11 games to come along befor starting to purchase DX11 Cards ect.

[Necro101]

I think people should wait for the DX11 games to come along befor starting to purchase DX11 Cards ect.

Not true, DX11 cards will be more powerful then anything that came before. You will have increased performance from DX9 AND DX10 games.

[Incognito]

Sounds good. Can't wait and see what the developers will do with this.

[@@GJC@@]

Not true, DX11 cards will be more powerful then anything that came before. You will have increased performance from DX9 AND DX10 games.

O sounds good then, will just have to check the price tag though

[Wesley]

Direct3D 11 is currently under development. It was presented at Gamefest 2008 on July 22, 2008 and demonstrated at the NVISION 08 technical conference on August 26, 2008.[18][19] AMD previewed working DirectX11 hardware at Computex on June 3, 2009, running some DirectX 11 SDK samples[20]. No exhaustive specification has been made publicly available by Microsoft, but the company has listed most of its features, including:

* Tessellation — to increase at runtime the number of visible polygons from a low detail polygonal model
* Multithreaded rendering — to render to the same Direct3D device object from different threads for multi core CPUs
* Compute shaders

Other notable features are the addition of two new texture compression algorithms for more efficient packing of high quality and HDR/alpha textures and an increased texture cache.

The Direct3D 11 runtime will be able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10.x-class hardware and drivers.[18][21] This will allow developers to unify the rendering pipeline and make use of API improvements such as better resource management and multithreading even on entry-level cards, though advanced features such as new shader models and rendering stages will only be exposed on up-level hardware. [17]

Tessellation was earlier considered for Direct3D 10, but was later abandoned. GPUs such as Radeon R600 feature a tessellation engine that can be used with Direct3D 9/10[22] and OpenGL, but it's not compatible with Direct3D 11 (according to Microsoft). Older graphics hardware such as GeForce 3/4, Radeon 8xxx had support for another form of tesselation (RT patches, N patches) but those technologies never saw substantial use. As such, their support was dropped from newer hardware.

Microsoft has also hinted at other features such as order independent transparency, which was never exposed by the Direct3D API but supported almost transparently by early Direct3D hardware such as Videologic's PowerVR line of chips.

The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview has been included in November 2008 release of DirectX SDK. [23]


The Release Candidate of Windows 7 integrates the first released Direct3D 11 support.

While that's all well and good, what really got me when I first heard of it was this:


The Direct3D 11 runtime will be able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10.x-class hardware and drivers.

That's how we get DX9 hardware to run DX10 graphics. Its an impressive feat, DX11, and I hope it does reveal performance improvements when the final distribution is released. Whats also interesting to note is that DX11 features compute shaders - in essense allowing all GPUs to be used to perform those intensive tasks, making CUDA a more expensive, and possibly useless option.

[Signor 65]

This is good news, really good news. Still, I'm sure the price tag will be immense. This might sway many people's upgrade plans for a while to come (including me).

[dolfieman]

Dunno if the price tag will be that high, remember when the 8800GTS came out? I picked up mine in 2007 for R2550 ex VAT, which was significantly cheaper than the DX9 7900GT I got for R4200 (inc VAT).

With all the improvements in the technology including the die shrinking trend on the GPU, I believe manufacturing costs wouldn't be that high, and also one would find nice mid to high-end cards that won't break the bank, whilst delivering great results.

This is only my opinion/outlook on the situation, as always, we'll have to wait and see.

[3mile]

All that work and still we are only gaming on one "OS" when will new, different, better "OS"s be available for us gamers... (Hardware is expensive enough don't want to spend more on a OS)

[Wesley]

Dunno if the price tag will be that high, remember when the 8800GTS came out? I picked up mine in 2007 for R2550 ex VAT, which was significantly cheaper than the DX9 7900GT I got for R4200 (inc VAT).

With all the improvements in the technology including the die shrinking trend on the GPU, I believe manufacturing costs wouldn't be that high, and also one would find nice mid to high-end cards that won't break the bank, whilst delivering great results.

This is only my opinion/outlook on the situation, as always, we'll have to wait and see.

I agree, from here on we'll see more mainstream graphics and perhaps even some budget models which are able to play games at max settings, but with a lower resolution. From here on out, things like Tessellation and Duo-to-Quad HD resolution and all that freaky, drool-able stuff will fall to the high-end models.


All that work and still we are only gaming on one "OS" when will new, different, better "OS"s be available for us gamers... (Hardware is expensive enough don't want to spend more on a OS)

What do you mean by that? "All gaming on one OS"?

[dolfieman]

What Wesley said. I presume he's talking about Windows XP.