June 3rd, 2009
AMD to ship DirectX 11 GPUs this year
If you’re planning to put down some cash for a new GPU, you might want to wait. Today at COMPUTEX, AMD announced that it plans to deliver DirectX 11 GPUs to support Windows 7 later this year, ahead of the competition.
DirectX 11 brings with it three major improvements to the DirectX API:
- Tessellation - Allows higher definition 3D models to be created.
- Compute Shader - Parallel processing capability
- Improved multithreading - Better support for multi-core CPUs
Rick Bergman, senior vice president of AMD’s products group called DirectX 11 “the biggest inflection point in graphics in 10 years.”
The new GPUs will be based on 40nm fabrication technology and produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
I’m pretty certain that these cards will be the Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5870X2 detailed here.
What all this means is that it’s now a bad time to spend much money on a GPU, certainly a high-end one (I’ve said this before, but it’s worth reiterating). While DirectX11 is backward compatible, I expect that there will be a performance overhead similar to that you see with DirectX10.1 running on DirectX10 hardware.
More DirectX 11 related info from AMD here.
Check out these cool DirectX 11 demos caught over at COMPUTEX (via HEXUS):
What are your GPU purchasing plans?
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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| 06/03/09
