AMD previews DirectX 11 GPU

Tech demo'd six months ahead of availability

Computex AMD has shown off what it claims is the "world's first" GPU capable of supporting the new graphics technologies implemented by Microsoft's DirectX 11 framework.

We're sure Nvidia has one of these in its lab too, and the real test of the two arch-rivals will be who gets the darn thing into the hands of gamers first. AMD's offering, at admitted yesterday, won't arrive until "the end of 2009".

Plenty of time for a DX11 GeForce in the meantime.

DX11-capable games will take while to arrive, as titles that can take advantage of new DirectX technology always do. But Windows 7 will make use of the framework, using API's CPU-on-GPU workload shifting to accelerate processor-intensive tasks, a technique both AMD and Nvidia have been touting for some time.

AMD may have the edge on DX11's tessellation feature, having already implemented in the Radeon HD series in anticipation of the technique's implementation in DX10. It never made the cut, but tessellation will appear in DX11. It brings the promise if much more complex geometries - essentially, more detailed models than we've seen before. ®