Unlike DirectX 9, the DirectX 10 will not have a more than four year lifespan as Microsoft Corp. plans to introduce features of DirectX 11 application programming interface at the forthcoming XNA gamefest conference that takes place next week in Seattle, Washington. Moreover, ATI, graphics product group of AMD, and Nvidia Corp. also plan to discuss certain Direct3D 11 features at upcoming conferences.

Microsoft is going to host four sessions dedicated to Direct3D 11 application programming interface (API), according to agenda of XNA conference. The world’s largest software maker plans to introduce the Direct3D 11 graphics pipeline, unveil details about D3D 11 Tessellation capability, new type of shaders called Compute Shader as well as high level shader language 5.0.

According to Microsoft, Direct3D 11 extends and enhances Direct3D 10 with new hardware and API calls. For example, Direct3D 11 introduces the Compute Shader as a way to access this computational capability without so many constraints. It opens the door to operations on more general data-structures than just arrays, and to new classes of algorithms as well.

Key features of compute shader include: communication of data between threads, and a rich set of primitives for random access and streaming I/O operations. These features enable faster and simpler implementations of techniques already in use, such as imaging and post-processing effects, and also open up new techniques that become feasible on Direct3D 11–class hardware.

You can read the entire article at X-bit Labs.