Posted 06/22/09 at 04:37:15 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to Rick Bergman, AMD’s Senior Vice President for Platforms, he and his crew are looking to beat Nvidia to the world of DX11.

According to Bergman, “We want to supply hardware to Microsoft and software developers so they can make DX11 games on our hardware first.” This would put AMD ahead of Nvidia, something that hasn’t happened for several years, thanks to Nvidia’s dominance in the DX10 market. “We were kind of fighting from behind, but with DX11 it feels like we’re ahead this round.”

Despite reports that very few game titles would take advantage of DX11, Bergman is keeping up his enthusiasm. Reportedly, he knows of a handful of independent software vendors that are working “eagerly” to release games.

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Posted 06/03/09 at 09:47:14 AM by Paul Lilly

During a press conference at Computex, AMD gave the world's first official DirectX 11 GPU demonstration, saying the new API will debut before the end of 2009. When it does, AMD promised it would beat the competition to the punch and "deliver DirectX 11 first."

"Games and other applications are about to get a lot better as a result of AMD's new graphics hardware and DirectX 11," AMD stated in a press release. "DirectX 11 features such as tessellation will bring consumers higher quality, superior performing games making use of 6th generation AMD technology."

AMD also said its DX11-based videocards will improve Windows 7 performance in a wide number of applications and in a way that's "completely transparent to users," such as accelerating the conversion of video playback on portable media players.

Catch the full press release here.

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Posted 10/06/08 at 10:05:49 AM by Paul Lilly

Hear that noise? It's the sound of DirectX 10 (and 10.1) failing to make much of an impact on the PC gaming scene. The slow adoption of DX10 can't be blamed on a lack of hype or anticipation, and gamers might need to prepare themselves for round 2. ATI, stil the only videocard manufacturer to offer DX10.1 compliant silicon, is casting an eye towards 2009 and telling whoever will listen that DirectX 11 is on the horizon.

Currently showing off next-generation technologies at Ceatec, ATI said it expects to launch DX11 GPUs within the next 12-14 months. It's far too early to tell what impact that will having on the gaming community, but on the plus side, DX11 is expected to raise the bar in terms of GPGPU functions and multithreading, as well as bringing support for hardware tessellation for the first time.

ATI also says its on track to release GPUs based on a 40nm manufacturing process, though the company stopped short of offering a specific time frame.

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Posted 07/22/08 at 04:22:01 PM by Norman Chan

One of the big announcements at this year’s Gamefest – Microsoft’s XNA developers conference taking place in Seattle right now – is the next step for the Games for Windows initiative. We spoke with Kevin Unangst, Senior Global Director of Games for Windows, who gave us a breakdown of the updated service and how it’ll affect current GFW account owners. Kevin also clued us into the details from the official DirectX 11 unveiling, including what three new features have been added to the API.

Click through the jump for more details, and how this affects gamers who've already paid for GFW LIVE accounts. 

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Posted 07/13/08 at 05:58:10 PM by Paul Lilly

There was much hype surrounding Microsoft's DirectX 10 API before its release, and since its debut, we've seen a handful of games take advantage of the new instruction sets. But there still lacks that killer game that blows every DX9 title out of the water and many gamers still resent the decision to tie DX10 exclusively with Vista, leaving the XP faithful out in the cold. And for those that made the upgrade? Microsoft's incremental DX10.1 update came as a slap in the face to anyone who upgraded both their OS and videocard in the hopes of future-proofing their system. Only ATI's 3xxx and 4xxx series support the minor update, which might not be so minor after all.

Soon making the DX10 and DX10.1 controversies old news, TGDaily reports Microsoft will unveil the next major update -- DirectX 11 -- at this year's annual XNA Gamefest scheduled to take place on July 22 and 23 in Seattle. Little is known about DX11, except that Microsoft plans to make it available for both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

With the dust yet to settle on DX10, are gamers looking forward to DX11?

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