DirectX 11 will be available sometimes this year - no date has been put forward - and will be compatible with DirectX 10 hardware.
One problem though is that Vista will be a pre-requisite for using DirectX 11 - like DirectX 10 - which rules out thousands of Windows XP users who have resisted moving to a platform that some consider to be amongst the worst gaming OSes ever released by Microsoft.
Amongst the features that are being introduced are a new shader technology that will take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor as the possibility of exploiting multi core processors using multi-threaded resource handling plus support for tessallation.
Chris Satchell, Microsoft's Entertainment Business Division CTO, said that DirectX 11 will bring a number of new features to existing DirectX 10 and will hopefully improve the performance of popular games overall.

Have you read these related articles?
Newsletter: