I'll probably receive a few emails from programmers and developers for this oversimplified explanation though.įact is, and this you need to remember with multi-threaded rendering, DirectX will take better advantage of all the available processing cores.Īnother new feature in DirectX 11 I find very exciting is DirectCompute. Which approach do you think would get all cars to point B the quickest? Exactly. Now imagine a hundred lane road where all hundred cars have a lane available. Think of a hundred cars that have to move over a single lane road from point A to B. And that means better overall performance. The GPU as such can now handle all the data completely threaded. If an instruction or shader has to be queued up (single threaded) that creates latency, a delay. Much like modern day applications and processors, it is now possible to fire off code and datasets directly towards the GPU multi-threaded, we call this multi-threaded rendering. Let's highlight and discuss the five more important features that will effect you the most. Here are the most prominent new features of DirectX 11 (and I'm keeping this as simple as possible) that will effect you directly: This really is a revolutionary step in development, as parallel processing can be really helpful in specific situations and this software. It's a first step but quite a number of applications that would benefit from GPU computing now can make use of it. With the compute shader comes DirectCompute as well, allowing Windows Vista or Windows 7 to utilize the GPU directly from within Windows. This is the new shader palette for developers to use: Vertex, Hull, Domain, Geometry, Pixel and Compute Shaders. Gamers on their side can have faster running games with some really cool new eye candy. Developers can speed up their games and improve it with more complex shaders and a few new tricks like tesselation. Good news though, DirectX 11 is an extensive step upwards for both developers and gamers. Probably the most horrendous call Microsoft ever made for an operating system. Next to that add the stupendous limitation from Microsoft to limit DX10 to Windows Vista only.

Face it, if there are not enough changes over DX9 then why should software houses invest in a new code path and thus spend extra money on development? This literally was a problem with DX generation 10.

It's funny how most game developers skipped DX10 really.

Directx 11 feature level 10.0