DirectX 10 is the graphics technology Microsoft introduced concomitantly with its latest operating system Windows Vista. But the Redmond company is also evolving DirectX and it is on the verge of introducing the next version, planned to be included into the fabric of the first service pack for Vista. Still, while Microsoft is not yet ready to breathe a word on Vista SP1 due to Sinofsky's Windows Omerta codenamed Translucency, DirectX 10.1 is a whole different thing altogether, mainly because of the intimate connection between Windows and the gaming industry, as Vista spells the future platform of choice for gamers worldwide.
At this point in time Microsoft revealed that over 10 million people worldwide are using Windows Vista as their main gaming platform. An impressive share of all the shipped Vista licenses in the world have gone to the gaming community, in the context in which the adoption of the operating system has to be correlated with DirectX 10 graphics hardware.
But Microsoft is nowhere near the end of its DirectX saga and it is ready to make the next step with Vista SP1 and the built in DirectX 10.1. According to the Redmond company version 10.1 will feature improved texturing, surface tessellation, transparency/anti-aliasing and general computation all in an effort to deliver superior image quality and programmability on the side of the developers.
Chas. Boyd, Software Architect Windows Graphics, revealed that in the future development plans for DirectX, Microsoft will address "surface tessellation, accelerated texture compression, new compressed texture formats, better integration with CPUs and shader language evolution." In the same manner, the Redmond company will deal with delivering enhanced HDTV quality and CG Movie Quality and will seek to eliminate the existing programmability limitations, which can only be good new for developers.
With DirectX 10.1 Microsoft will also focus on "per Multi-RenderTarget blend modes, control of multisample AA, cube map arrays, more inter-stage registers and on improved precision," Boyd added. But apart from the work being poured into image quality and user experience improvements, Microsoft will also "enable procedural content generation (Textures and Meshes); dynamic scaling, and access to new hardware functionality, [while also addressing] CPU – GPU convergence."
