AfterDawn: News

Microsoft, chip makers tweak DirectX 11 to boost Windows 7 performance

Microsoft Corp. and chip makers including Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are working on the DirectX 11 application programming interface (API) to maximize its potential for more realistic graphics, improved multimedia performance and other features in Windows 7. Software designed to unload tasks from the CPU to graphics processing cores is not new, but Microsoft aims to maximize on the potential of breaking up tasks to multiple cores in its new operating system.

Nvidia is using DirectX 11 with Windows 7 and its own hardware to accelerate certain tasks, such as image manipulation. "Microsoft did a number of things within the operating system that allow us to take the computing horsepower we developed for visual computing and apply it to a range of tasks that have never been seen before," said Ned Finkle, vice president of strategic marketing at Nvidia.



Neal Robison, director of independent software vendor relations at AMD, said that DirectX 11 efficiently harnesses the huge potential of parallel processing with GPUs. "We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible," he said, while giving another example of how Windows 7 will use the technology to push interoperability by automatically converting video on-the-fly to an appropriate format while transferring to a portable device.

Graphics cards currently available on the market, or integrated graphics, support DirectX 10/10.1, but AMD showed off a prototype DirectX 11 GPU back in June.

Written by: James Delahunty @ 7 Aug 2009 17:36

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• 11 comments

• DVDBack23

  Excellent.

  7.8.2009 17:41 #1

• DXR88

  A new directX runtime can't we stick with 10.1 and fix its huge resource issue before rolling the next one out please.

  7.8.2009 20:33 #2

• KillerBug

  Originally posted by DXR88: A new directX runtime can't we stick with 10.1 and fix its huge resource issue before rolling the next one out please.Perhapse it is quicker to make a whole new one than to fix the bugs in the old one! Or maybe they are telling the truth, and they have figured out how to do multi-core processing better (thanks to AMD/ATI & NVIDIA).

  7.8.2009 22:22 #3

• devingman

  "We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible,"
  
  I remember they said the same thing about DirectX 10...

  8.8.2009 12:49 #4

• EricCarr

  Originally posted by devingman: "We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible,"
  
  They say the same thing everytime they bring one out.

  9.8.2009 01:58 #5

• Josipher

  Quote:Originally posted by devingman: "We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible,"
  
  They say the same thing everytime they bring one out.untill virtual reality is mass marketed for gaming im just gunna take every DirectX update as a re-release of the old one..seriously they cant really push it that much further..

  9.8.2009 07:01 #6

• DXR88

  i find OpenGL superior to DirecX Anyway

  9.8.2009 11:26 #7

• plutonash

  sucks that directX 10 will be seen as a bust because no one brought Vista

  9.8.2009 11:58 #8

• WHDACV

  Quote:sucks that directX 10 will be seen as a bust because no one brought Vista I cant imagine that it could not have been released for xp
  If they did then it would have been what they said it would have been
  It is their own fault that M$ stuff does not work with M$ stuff

  13.8.2009 19:38 #9

• ToxicFish

  Quote:plutonash (Member) 9 August 2009 10:58
  sucks that directX 10 will be seen as a bust because no one brought Vista
  DirectX 10 did what it was supposed to do... Promote the sales of Vista. Too bad that Vista was Win ME all over again.

  18.8.2009 12:33 #10

• handsom

  The interesting thing this time around, is that if you dig up a few of the more technical articles, as well as articles referring to the early showings, it appears that this one actually *IS* going to have some improvement. Coupled with Win7's multi-threaded optimization (Early tests reveal that it should indeed be better optimized for multi core than Vista), this could be a great step.
  
  I guess one other thing that I'd kind of like to see as a focus, thought it won't happen, is the ability not just to shift things ONTO the GPU, but also off. Whether you've got a card that doesn't have a lot of stream processors, or if your card eventually becomes less capable of handling harder tasks in the future, it would be nice for the system to be able (so long as your cpu and ram were ample) to better take some of the GPU's workload and speed things up a bit. With so many games already being SO VERY GPU intensive... I'm concerned that trying to add too many tasks onto it might create a negative result. I'm all for multi-threading management, but I really hope M$\NVidia\Ati are considering the ability to make that go both ways, not just ONTO the GPU.

  1.10.2009 16:39 #11