Much how Windows 7 is Vista's redemption, DirectX 11 could be DirectX 10's redemption. Much of the problem with DirectX 10 was that it seemed to help the programmers do more of what DirectX 9 did and helped make it easier to do. So as a result, we didn't really see much of a difference between DirectX 9 and 10. It also supposedly degraded performance (but my money is on the fact that all games are DirectX 9 games with DirectX 10 extensions done afterwwards).
But I found this picture of the new STALKER: Call of Prypiat that I found from http://www.sector.sk/novinka/49676/stalker_ukazuje_dx11_vylepsenia.htm
Thanks to DirectX 11's newest feature, hardware tessellation, we no longer have to wait for graphics cards to become so powerful that they can process the raw polygons. Instead, graphics cards fill it in for us. So what may start as a 10K polygon model may end up being 50K in the final render (conservative estimate, I wouldn't be surprised if we had 500K polygon models in the final render).
However as a caveat, hardware tessellation only smooths out curves, enhancing the sihoullette of the model. It won't create say those straps on the model we're seing here. But hey, since we don't have to devote so many polygons in smoothing out a model, maybe we can have that full 3D strap.
But with things like Compute Shader (replacing the original Shader Model) coming around, we could see things like better lighting, AI, physics, etc. that are all graphics card independent. So much for NVIDIA buying PhysX and developing CUDA.
Okay Geek Farm
Brandon Davenport
