AMD Demos DirectX 11-Capable ATI Graphics Card

An anonymous reader writes "Today at a press conference in Taiwan, AMD demonstrated the world's first GPU capable of DirectX 11 technology. The demonstrations shows the major improvements DirectX 11 gives us over DirectX 10 and also shows us what AMD has in store for an ATI Graphics Card coming out before the end of 2009 capable of DirectX 11. AMD shows three primary features of DirectX 11: a tessellator, which allows for less blocky and more fluid and realistic details; compute shaders which allows for less restricted programming; and finally, how DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores."

Comments

Direct X11?

[TeknoHog]

Or is Microsoft finally catching up with the unix world?

Will programmers be able to utilize?

[gubers33]

That is the real question, the PS3 for example has amazing computing speed and a great graphics card, but game programmers have yet been able to utilize the system to its full potential. I'll be curious to see if the same occurs here.

Re:Will programmers be able to utilize?

[nobodylocalhost]

I think tessellation will be controllable on the driver side, in that case, you wont need to write specialized code in order to take advantage of it.
From what I understand, it is basically point based curve matching using differential calculus - a fundamental change in the way models are being rendered. So even for existing games, you just need to turn on tessellation processing with your graphics card driver, and you should be able to take advantage of it due to the fact it just changes the rendering method, models themselves and other parameters should remain the same.

Re:Linux drivers?

[Darkness404]

When has ATI had solid anything drivers. Even the Windows drivers cause BSoDs for no apparent reason.

The real question is...

[nycguy]

Will Duke Nukem Forever wait to take advantage of DirectX 11?

Re:Linux drivers?

[Kjella]

Doesn't seem to have stopped nVIDIA from making a pretty solid driver for Linux.

nVidia basicly overrode the lower third or so of X11 (it's a big function pointer table) and wrote their own implementation, ATI did the same except with less success. AMD/Intel is now trying to invent a proper open source stack with graphics execution manager (GEM) for memory management, kernel mode setting (KMS) for flicker free boots and more, low-level state tracking framework called Gallium3D to expose modern shaders, better direct rendering interface (DRI2), redirected direct rendering (RDR) and various other improvements but you're talking about things only 1-2 years old. nVidia has succeeded yes but for most intents and purposes they wrote the whole thing themselves, There's a reason it's a sore point for open source fanatics, it's not merely a blob addon it basicly ripped out a whole chunk of open source, said "not good enough" and replaced it with their own blob.