AMD discusses advantages of DirectX 11

AMD Senior Manager of Developer Relations Richard Huddy has published a blog post to discuss why you should get excited about DirectX 11. You can read it over here, he predicts the new API will result in higher frame rates, smoother and more realistic characters and terrains, and cheaper game development costs. One of the main improvements in DX11 is the support for tessellation:

A beast called the tessellator has been added which enables games developers to create smoother, less blocky and more organic looking objects in games. This is the change you’ll probably be most aware of. And it’ll show up when you look at the silhouettes of hills and mountains or the profiles of characters in games. Where artists previously had to trade off quality for performance, now artists will have the freedom to create naturalistic scenery. We’ve gotten used to seeing strangely blocky ears and noses on our opponents. But the new generation of games should allow those opponents to scare the heck out of us instead. The tessellator represents a natural next step in gaming hardware (in fact the Xbox 360 graphics chip that AMD designed already has a tessellator, and AMD graphics hardware has featured tessellator technology starting with the ATI RadeonTM HD 2000 series right up to the latest ATI RadeonTM HD 4000 series cards today).