Microsoft reveals more details about DirectX 11 tesselation

Posted at: 12:24pm 28th August 2008 by Mark Mackay

Tesselation and GPGPU help new DirectX go one louder than previous versions, but there#s still no idea of release date

Nvision 2008: Microsoft’s Kevin Gee revealed more details of its up-coming update to DirectX during a talk at Nvidia's Nvision show. After plenty of pre-conference chat about the non-event that was DirectX 10, Gee went into some technical detail on how DirectX 11 will benefit games.

The overall goal of DirectX 11 will be to ease the workload of current GPUs and of game developers. To achieve these goals, new types of shader are being added to the API, including a hull shader and tessalator domain shader, in addition to the compute shader which has been mentioned previously.

The tessalator is arguably the most interesting development Gee talked about, and is a good example of DirectX 11's focus on performance. As wireframes (i.e the 3D models of characters and objects in a game) become ever more complex, the amount of memory used increases. The tessalator unit simplifies complex wireframes, making them more digestible for the GPU and so reducing memory usage.

DirectX 11 will also be optimised for GPGPU work and multithreading. According to Gee, taking a GPGPU approach to post process rendering effects such as bloom and HDR will create 'significant performance benefits'.

Microsoft were vague about when all this would be available, with the final slide in the presentation stating 'Preview bits will be available in November 2008 SDK' meaning that it will be at the very least next year before we start seeing DirectX 11 in games.

The talk by Gee was one of the more exciting at Nvision and if everything he spoke about is implemented, then we could finally start to see some of the potential showed by DirectX 10 come to the surface.

Previous DirectX 11 coverage:
* DirectX 11 to feature compute shader
* DirectX 11 to be revealed in July
* DirectX 11 will be compatible with DirectX 10 hardware

More from Nvision 2008:
* Nvidia CEO demos Minority Report style interface