In about two weeks, Microsoft is going to officially announce the DirectX 11 specifications. The new API is supposed to be the default one in the upcoming Windows 7 (codename Vienna), but Fudzilla informs that DX 11 will also be available for Vista, since Vienna is based on the Vista kernel. This means that DX 11 can be released by the end of 2009. However, I reckon that we won’t see playable games using the new API sooner than summer 2010.

DX11 will bring quite a few improvements to the DX10 architecture, including support for Tessellation (which is already supported at a hardware level by ATI’s cards), compute Shaders - to further help the CUDA and GPGPU projects, CPU multithread support and some new texture compression. It will also bring the improved Shader model 5.0. Unfortunately, we won’t see any ray tracing support for the next several years.

Tessellation will be the next best thing and ATI foresaw this about two years ago. The tessellation algorithm can subdivide objects and give them better level of details and more polygons, making normal mapping quite obsolete.

More details about the new API will also be released by NVIDIA at its Nvision event in August.