DirectX 11 Coming to a PC Near You, Now with Ray Tracing!

[Marik]

It appears that DirectX 11 could be hitting Vista by Late 2008 courtesy of Intel. DirectX 11 will feature Intel's new Ray Tracing engine. No exact timeline has been given but rumors have it that Intel has developed a large part of DirectX 11. DirectX 11 will feature 2 modes one for Applications and one for Hardware.

ATI/AMD and Intel would have no issues with DirectX 11 coming out but Nvidia on the other hand might have some issues since DirectX 11 is developed to use the x86 architecture. But if Nvidia happened to buy out VIA's x86 team which could solve this issue, but not much is known on how Nvidia will react.

Microsoft just released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 but that doesn't mean they are resting on their laurels. Amongst other things, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 includes support for DirectX 10.1, something ATI would be profoundly happy to mention time and time again as only their graphics cards at the moment support DirectX 10.1.

Isn't it odd that NVIDIA has yet to include support for DirectX 10.1 even in their latest releases, the GeForce 9600 GT and the GeForce 9800 GX2? In fact, they have virtually thumbed their noses at that "insignificant" update. Well, they have their reasons. Six years ago at SIGGRAPH 02, NVIDIA's chief scientist, David Kirk, was already talking about ray tracing:

“I’ll be interested in discussing a bigger question, though: ‘When will hardware graphics pipelines become sufficiently programmable to efficiently implement ray tracing and other global illumination techniques?’. I believe that the answer is now, and more so from now on! As GPUs become increasingly programmable, the variety of algorithms that can be mapped onto the computing substrate of a GPU becomes ever broader.

As part of this quest, I routinely ask artists and programmers at movie and special effects studios what features and flexibility they will need to do their rendering on GPUs, and they say that they could never render on hardware! What do they use now: crayons? Actually, they use hardware now, in the form of programmable general-purpose CPUs. I believe that the future convergence of realistic and real-time rendering lies in highly programmable special-purpose GPUs.”

Source: techarp

[mjall]

Neat go ATI :)

[LoKz]

ATI is real good always used there cards :)

[Bolt_Gundam510]

i am just going to wait till i have enough money to get me a new computer or something or upgrade what i all ready have. though what kind of graphic card to use that's the question? i wouldn't mind haveing both of them though.