DirectX 11 to Windows 7 !!

New versions of Windows have featured new versions of DirectX, the 3D audio and graphics family of APIs, and it now appears that Windows 7 will be no exception. According to PC Games Hardware, Microsoft's Ben Basaric, Product Marketing Manager Windows, says that Redmond will be bundling DirectX 11 with Windows 7, after all. Earlier this week, PCGH had reported that the pairing of DirectX 11 and Windows 7 was "unlikely."

So, what's new in DirectX 11? As we reported this summer, DX 11 will include compute shader technology, enabling the GPU to perform operations other than 3D graphics; better multi-core resource handling; more efficient utilization of the processing pipeline; hardware tesselation support for more detailed 3D models.

When can you expect to buy DirectX 11-compliant GPUs? AMD says its first DirectX 11 parts will be available in late 2009 - right about the time Windows 7 is expected to arrive. New operating system and new graphics hardware? Hopefully, that's a recipe for more realistic 3D graphics than ever before. If Microsoft and OEMs continue to work as closely as the Engineering Windows 7 blog suggests, that's much more likely than a repeat of the poorly handled rollout of Vista-ready hardware at Vista's introduction.

Although Gamefest is entirely developer-centric, there's still plenty to interest those aforementioned groups, and thus our plan with this article is to sift through the mass of information now available regarding DirectX 11, pick out the big-hitting changes worthy of discussion, and bring them to you at a relatively high level to give you all an early understanding of what the API is setting out to do, and the kind of features and functionality you can expect in the next couple of years from both your games and graphics boards. Sound interesting? You bet it does, so let's dive straight in.