It's official! At a recent GameFest 2008 even a Redmond, Microsoft unveiled some details about the successor to the DirectX lineage - the DirectX 11. No doubt, DirectX 10.1 is still going strong with optimized video cards from both ATI and Nvidia battling it out, but Microsoft seems to have chalked out basic outlines for the next iteration of the multimedia API.

For starters, Vista will be supported as well as other OS versions that may appear in the future. The main part is that existing DirectX 10 cards will be supported along with the newer ones that will come out then for the new DirectX11.However, the fact that could excite enthusiasts is news about the capability to take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor. With DirectX11, the processor might find a helping hand from the GPU. This does not necessarily translate into slow performance due to this shared workload. Instead, multi-threaded resource handling will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines.