Good times ahead for Vista and Windows 7 users with DX11: DirectX 11 is on its way, but with the slow take up of DX10 in both the home and in the development houses what is it that we should be getting excited about with this new revision? Well, from the looks of things quite a lot, as we learned from Microsoft's Kevin Gee at the recent Nvision conference.
The link between Windows Vista and DirectX 10 is fairly universally seen as one of the big drawbacks to the last iteration of the ubiquitous graphics API. After all, the percentage of people with DX10 capable hardware is growing exponentially, but the percentage of people using that hardware in collaboration with Microsoft's latest OS is far smaller. The lack of backwards compatibility was a big problem for DX10 and something that has been tackled with DX11.
While you will still need to have Vista as the minimum OS, the package is being released with the next iteration of Windows – Windows 7 – and so will be compatible across both platforms. It's also going to be compatible across the hardware spectrum as well, working with DX10 and DX10.1 specced graphics cards, as well as the new SM5 cards to come. This means that right from the off there will be a large installed user base ready to use the new API.
Another positive feature from the development point of view is that as a continuation of DirectX 10 anyone familiar with coding for that platform will feel at home with DX11. Fingers crossed this should encourage more devs to pick it up and run with the new feature set for the PC.
The link between Windows Vista and DirectX 10 is fairly universally seen as one of the big drawbacks to the last iteration of the ubiquitous graphics API. After all, the percentage of people with DX10 capable hardware is growing exponentially, but the percentage of people using that hardware in collaboration with Microsoft's latest OS is far smaller. The lack of backwards compatibility was a big problem for DX10 and something that has been tackled with DX11.
While you will still need to have Vista as the minimum OS, the package is being released with the next iteration of Windows – Windows 7 – and so will be compatible across both platforms. It's also going to be compatible across the hardware spectrum as well, working with DX10 and DX10.1 specced graphics cards, as well as the new SM5 cards to come. This means that right from the off there will be a large installed user base ready to use the new API.
Another positive feature from the development point of view is that as a continuation of DirectX 10 anyone familiar with coding for that platform will feel at home with DX11. Fingers crossed this should encourage more devs to pick it up and run with the new feature set for the PC.
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