DirectX 11 arrives in Q3 2009

DirectX 11 ships in October 2009 and will not wait for Windows 7.

Instead, DX11 will be fully compatible with the deplorable Windows Vista. That is good news for the gaming industry and even better news for the dejected Vista DirectX 10 consumers. Windows 7, codenamed Windows Vienna will ship in early to mid 2010.

Graphics blokes along with the hugely powerful gaming industry and GPU giants Nvidia and AMD want to get things to the next level as soon as possible and some elements of DirectX 11 will get things such as tessellation to the next level.

DirectX 10 was a resounding disappointment for it performed NOTHING to what it promised. Microsoft even stooped to false advertising of titles like Flight Simulator X depicting stellar difference in graphics of the game between DX 9 and DX 10, forcing gamers to fork out $$ to upgrade to Windows Vista. 15 minutes after the game finally released, there were millions of disgruntled blokes demanding money back because it turned out that the imagery of FS X in DX 10 showed in the ads was just crude painting; and the real deal looked very underwhelming.

It was a sadder state of affairs for the majority of the other games, because they performed POORLY on DX 10 compared to DX 9. It was either that or an issue of hardware requirements. Popular games like Crysis for instance strangled the gameplay when gamers switched to DX 10 for its Ultra settings.

GPU giant AMD doled out Graphic cards, namely Radeon HD 3870, 3850, 3870X2, 4850 and 4870 which support DX 10.1, but Nvidia never offered support for anything more than DX 10. Nvidia said they would jump the ship and move directly to DX 11.

Lets hope (for the sake of Microsoft at least) that DX 11 performs like it promises.