DX11 to be announced in 2~ weeks, nvidia to talk about it too...

[mrk]

Microsoft will start talking about DirectX 11 in less than two weeks. Sources have confirmed that Microsoft game technology conference, previously known as Meltdown and now renamed to Gamefest 2008, will be the place where Microsoft plans to officially announce DirectX 11.

This conference takes place on the 22 and 23 July in Seattle, Washington and it will set you back $550 if you register online. You can find some more details about the conference here.

The big feature of DirectX 11 is Tessellation/Displacement while we also heard that Multithreaded Rendering and Compute Shaders are part of it. DirectX 11 also brings Shader model 5.0 but we don’t know many details about it.

It looks like DirectX 11 will stick to rasterization as there is no any mentioning of Ray tracing support.

Nvidia will also talk about DirectX 11 at its Nvision event / conference in late August 2008.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8345&Itemid=1

Could this be why nVidia is behind on current gen price/performance next to ATI, they're busy working away on a DX11 capable release ?

 

[mrk]

Well I must admit that with Vista, as with most new shiny things the general consumer public is more than happy and uses marketing hype and shiny UI to base thier views rather than actual performance facts and figures.

Vista has lots its shiny new feeling along time ago as it's 1.5yrs old now. fact is drivers are now at a level where stability and performance can be realised in Vista general usage performance and memory management.

 

[mrk]

Too true, the sluggishness of Vista really gets to me though I like the OS otherwise.



Not entirely, I still find simple file operations slower than on my XP laptop which has much lower specs than my desktop. From this perspective Vista was a disaster, I mean it took then a year to release a patch, though I like it overall.

XP was problematic for more than 1.5yrs before it got better (I downloaded from the beta days) . Vista in this regard is superior...

 

[mrk]

It took until SP2 for XP to be good and how many years later did SP2 come?

/thread !

 

[mrk]

I just realised something...

Since MS have now abandoned support and updates for XP future gaming IS going to be done on Vista or later - it's just the way progression moves.

So if MS stop supporting an OS then hardware vendors stop making drivers updated for it because in their view If MS are not updating such an OS then problems people have with hardware X may be because of a lack of OS update so won't bother wasting time and money updating drivers or even creating new hardware with native support for older OSes no longer supported by the OS maker.

You're forced to update OS whether you like it or not, it just takes a tiny bit longer for the forcage to take affect in this case.

Given this info I predict we will see more DX11 games than DX10 games during the first year of DX11 launch especially considering ATI's stance on high performance low price cards which has forced nvidia to lower their prices and even lose share value a bit!

 

[mrk]

There is no reason for those who have found no reason to switch and fair game.

I thought I had no valid reason to switch other than wanting to be on top of the game and know what people were talking about since I worked in IT and got a lot of calls from people on Vista as well as being a PC gamer I had that urge to have the latest piece of software so bought it and from day 1 had no issues I even upgraded mobo without a reinstall going from AMD to Intel and it's still great, this was from release day to today the same install!

Since then though I have "discovered" new things in Vista that I could never go back to XP for and until I had actually used Vista for x months I would have never wondered otherwise.

not major things but little things that make it easier to manage files and folders as well as access games/applications quickly and efficiently.

I don't use UAC or Defender and am using vista exactly as I did XP but now have more control over the OS and more control over my data and apps and how I use them more productively than I used to on XP!