AMD Demos DirectX 11 Capable ATI Graphics Card

Today at a press conference in Taiwan, AMD demonstrated the world's first GPU (graphics processor) capable of DirectX 11 technology. The demonstrations shows the major improvements DirectX 11 gives us over DirectX 10 and also shows us what AMD has in stored for an ATI Graphics Card coming out before the end of 2009 capable of DirectX 11.

"The fusion of AMDs 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 worlds first true DirectX 11 graphics processor." the AMD Press Release said.

AMD showed many examples of how the DirectX 11 capable card could render graphics under the new technology. One of the technologies in DirectX 11 is something called tessellator.

Tessellator allows for more smoother, less blocky, and more organic looking objects in games. Anti-aliasing shouldn't be confused with this, as AA does a descent job at smoothing out sharp edges but tessellator actually makes it look more fluid and frankly much more realistic.

Tessellator makes things look more "rounded" instead of chunky and blocky. Instead of having to trade off quality for performance, like in the past, developers can now have the most realistic scenes without a performance hit.

Tessellator capable hardware is already in the Xbox 360 as well as the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series and up to the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series cards. We just need the DirectX 11, to take advantage of it.

The next DX11 feature that should give game programmers a new way to program is "Compute Shaders". This feature allows programmers to treat the GPU in a much less graphic-oriented way.

"Up until DirectX 10.1 a graphics programmer always had to think in terms of triangles - but the compute shader changes that and allows the programmer a much freer expression of their thoughts.  If you try to solve a problem of artificial intelligence or physics, you probably dont think the problem through in terms of triangles.  So the compute shader is a more natural way for the programmer to approach his or her task.  On top of that it allows access to some of the features that would otherwise have been hidden away inside our present and future chips and for that reason it will often allow significantly more efficient implementations than heretofore (that means higher frame rates to you and me :-))." AMD said in their release.

Lastly, DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. This should allow developers to offload some of the work on to the processors that are typically there not doing as much work, freeing up the GPU to do the more important processing and rendering. In return, we should get better frame rates with systems that have multiple cores vs those that don't.

From the sound of it, DX11 should provide us much higher frame rates with the new technologies surrounding it and we'll get better and more realistic graphics in addition. What else could a gamer want?