Posted on Wednesday, November 12 2008 @ 2:11 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
X-bit Labs
noticed Microsoft
has released a new DirectX SDK that includes a basic technical preview of Direct3D 11:
The new version of performance investigator (PIX) tool for Windows, which is a part of DirectX SDK, supports basic stream capture and single frame capture for Direct3D 11, however the new Direct3D 11 hardware features like tessellation, compute shader, dynamic shader linkage, and new resource formats, are not supported. In addition, advanced features like shader debugging and mesh viewing are not supported, according to Microsoft.
The key API difference from Direct3D 10 in Direct3D 11 is the addition of deferred contexts, which enables scalable execution of Direct3D commands distributed over multiple cores. A Deferred Context captures and assembles actions like state changes and draw submissions that can be executed on the actual device at a later time. By utilizing Deferred Contexts on multiple threads, an application can distribute the CPU overhead needed in the Direct3D 11 runtime and the driver to multiple cores, enabling better use of an end-user's machine configuration.
