DirectX 11 Confirmed For Windows 7

November 24th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

German computer magazine PC Games Hardware received information from Ben Basaric, Product Marketing Manager Windows, that Windows 7 will ship with DirectX 11. He also confirmed that DirectX 11 will also be released for Windows Vista with the most likely scenario that DirectX 11 will be shipped as part of Windows Vista Service Pack 2.

Phil Taylor addressed hardware requirements of DirectX 11 back in a post in July:

DirectX 11 will have better compatibility with DirectX 10 hardware than most expected. What does that mean? Yes, there is some confusion over the “11 running on 10 hw” part of the announcement.

There are parts of the new API that are hardware independent, those can indeed run downlevel. The mult-threaded resource handling, for instance, can be enabled to run on DirectX 10 class hardware if the IHVs ( ATI, Intel, nVidia ) update their DirectX 10 drivers. Think of that part of it as “11 on 10″.

Then there are parts of the new API that do require new hardware support and will only run on DX11 class hardware. The hardware tesselator and Shader Model 5.0 are examples of those parts.

First video cards supporting DirectX 11 are scheduled for late 2009 which would fall right into the period that Windows 7 is said to be released.

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Martin Brinkmann is an Online Journalist from Germany who discovered his love for technology in high school. He is currently working as a freelancer for several publications and runs his own Internet website Ghacks

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