News streaming straight from the press conference hosted by Microsoft at the 2008 XNA Gamefest, DirectX 11 is to be the next level of the company's Windows-based applications programming interface (API). It will come complete with in-house support for multi-core processing machines and those PCs with powerful graphics add-on cards.

In addition to multi-threaded processing support, hardware-accelerated tessellation (for smoother, curvier, rounder 3D models) and new shader technology comprising of features symbolizing those from NVIDIA's "GPU-as-CPU" technology (CUDA - short for Compute Unified Device Architecture) are also tucked in DirectX 11 somewhere. But XP gamers must know that this isn't coming to their OS at all.
 
Because Chris Satchell, Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the entertainment business persuasion, announced that DX11 is exclusive only to Windows Vista and future versions of Windows. He also said that DirectX 11 is to be completely backward compatible with DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1-capable hardware. "There's not that [DirectX 9/10] discontinuity we created before," he added.

Though Microsoft was willing to provide a general list of new features coming to Vista gamers, they have not said when the new API would be rolling out. DirectX 10.1 was their most recent revision, which is not even significantly utilized by the industry as of the moment. The full list, as excerpted from Microsoft, are as follows:

• Full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows
• Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
• New computer shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
• Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines
• Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close

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