Hear that noise? It's the sound of DirectX 10 (and 10.1) failing to make much of an impact on the PC gaming scene. The slow adoption of DX10 can't be blamed on a lack of hype or anticipation, and gamers might need to prepare themselves for round 2. ATI, stil the only videocard manufacturer to offer DX10.1 compliant silicon, is casting an eye towards 2009 and telling whoever will listen that DirectX 11 is on the horizon.

Currently showing off next-generation technologies at Ceatec, ATI said it expects to launch DX11 GPUs within the next 12-14 months. It's far too early to tell what impact that will having on the gaming community, but on the plus side, DX11 is expected to raise the bar in terms of GPGPU functions and multithreading, as well as bringing support for hardware tessellation for the first time.ATI also says its on track to release GPUs based on a 40nm manufacturing process, though the company stopped short of offering a specific time frame.

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.