Software giant Microsoft today revealed details concerning DirectX 11, the latest edition of its PC gaming graphics API. Similar to DirectX 10, the software will be available only on Windows Vista and future versions of Microsoft's operating system. DirectX 11 will add new compute shader technology that Microsoft says will allow GPUs to be used "for more than just 3D graphics," allowing developers to utilize video cards as parallel processors.

Even though DirectX 10 is still quite fresh in developers and casual gamer's minds, Microsoft are already making a push to bring more advancements in the form of DirectX 11.

The company has today announced some initial details. One particular and expected highlight of DX11 is tessellation support which as far as I know is already being used in current-gen consoles such as the 360. It blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close. There are a number of other interesting additions MS is working on for the new API. This in a shell means that DX11 hardware will be quite different from DX10, as new features will be mandatory done in hardware. As for the tessalation unit goes, ATI is already supporting it from Radeon HD 2600 onwards..

Changes will also ba made in full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows:

•  Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
•  New compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
• Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines It also goes without saying that XP users will be left out in the cold on this one.

You can read more here.