This week there was a lot of buzz about DirectX 11. Yes, the newest version of the graphics API was unveiled by Microsoft at the XNA game fest and it has an interesting feature set that, I think, were long overdue. Most of DirectX 11 doesn’t diverge from version 10 (and the almost not eventful, version 10.1), but I think DirectX 11 should see a renewed interest from game developers since it provides features that were desperately needed in light of recent hardware developments. 11 (of course with the features of 10 and 10.1) now seems to be a more complete API to addresses issues related to game and graphics development and seems to be a more complete solution for the future.

What is really interesting to see is the emergence of what Microsoft terms as the “Compute Shader”, no doubt a marketing speak for GPGPU which they claim will allow the GPU, with it’s awesome power to be used for “more than just graphics”; which smells like CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if both turned out to be very similar (remember Cg/HLSL). In any case, what is important is the fact that such technology will be available to game developers under version 11. Technologies like CUDA (GPGPU) are the requirement of the hour and this could be the fact that 11 might see a lot more interest than the earlier (10.x) versions.

There is a lot of talk about hardware based tessellation, but frankly I haven’t seen too many details on that. At least not enough to make a detailed comment on it. From what little is being said, DirectX 11 hardware based tessellation could be used to make models appear “more smooth”. How this ultimately translates to actual implementation will be clear when more details come out. I am hazarding a guess here, but there should be something along the lines of some technology that allows sub-surf LODs to be calculated in real-time and/or displacement/bump/normal mapping to be done on the fly. I am not too sure as yet, but could be something along those lines, or maybe something in-between, or a combination of those techniques. Whatever it is, this would mean really good looking games in the future.

Issues like multi-threaded rendering/resource handling are things that were long time coming and yes, it’s a good thing we will finally see them in the newer version. It just makes my job as a game developer a whole lot easier. Most details on Shader Model 5.0 are pretty sketchy, so I won’t go into things like shader length and function recursion. However, I hope such issues are addressed satisfactorily in the newer shader model.

So will DirectX 11 succeeded where DirectX 10 failed? Will it get mass adoption like DirectX 9? Difficult to say. While most cutting edge games have adopted DirectX 10, it’s usage remains low because of several factors. For one many people still use XP which doesn’t support version 10 (or greater) of the API (for whatever reason) which means most developers have to adopt the lowest common denominator of the alternatives available, and that generally is DirectX 9.0. Also many people still don’t have DirectX 10 class hardware and that is also another reason not to go for 10.x. The issue with DirectX 10.1 is a total mess. It’s interesting, but there is even talk that NVIDIA might skip over 10.1, giving the version a total miss and aim directly for version 11 class hardware. There is logic to that decision; given that most games (except of the really high end ones) don’t even bother to use DirectX 10 let alone 10.1. All this makes adoption of 10.x a non lucrative issue for game developers.

Version 11 does bring in some really good features to gaming in general but that is not necessarily the reason the API will succeed. As a game developer, 11 holds some serious promise and could be a success if Microsoft plays it’s cards right. However there are some issues (mentioned above) that still bother me. Microsoft is still fixated on releasing version 11 only for Vista, so don’t expect your XP machines to ever run DirectX 11 even if you buy brand new hardware. That said, like most previous versions, DirectX 11 is backward compatible with version 10 and 10.1 and even 9.0. It would be impossible for Microsoft to ignore 1000s of games that already use DirectX 9 so it’s almost a written fact that newer versions of the API will continue to be backward compatible until and unless we see a complete divergence of a sizable amount of games to newer versions, and that could be a long way away since many games even today are still being produced on the 9.0 version.