As you may know, tessellation is an important feature enabled in Microsoft DirectX® 11. The technology allows developers to take advantage of the GPU to quickly and efficiently subdivide geometric models into a finer mesh of smaller polygons. Basically, game developers can use more triangles to create the images you see when you’re playing—with more triangles designers can draw surfaces that look more realistic. This in turn adds detail to rendered scenes, while conserving CPU cycles, memory, and bandwidth.

More importantly, tessellation enhances the visual details you notice most when gaming: more realistic characters, terrain, water, cloth, shadows, and more, all while maintaining a high level of performance.

AMD places heavy emphasis on the end goal – to provide the best gaming experience. To that end, AMD has a team of developer relations engineers who focus on using the features of DirectX® 11 in the most effective way.

Tessellation is a terrific tool to deliver more realism and visual fidelity. However, careless use of the technology can quickly overwhelm the GPU and cause it to perform less efficiently with no visible benefit in image quality. Here are some potential pitfalls that can happen when tessellation is employed incorrectly:

• Rasterization: It’s important for all DirectX® 11-capable GPUs that tessellation not result in most polygons covering 1 pixel or less, in order to allow the rasterizers to keep operating at a reasonable level of efficiency.

• Overshadowing: If there are high levels of tessellation, it can produce many sub-pixel sized polygons, greatly increasing the impact of overshading.

• Multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) techniques: Since tessellation results in a large number of small polygons, it also increases the number of pixels falling on polygon edges, thus reducing the efficiency of MSAA.

To overcome these challenges, our developer relations engineers make sure games can realize the full image quality benefits of tessellation while still making good use of GPU resources. This is done by using a variety of adaptive techniques that use high tessellation levels only for parts of a scene that are close to the viewer, on silhouette edges, or in areas requiring  fine detail. Our goal is to keep polygon size at or above 16 pixels as much as possible. This allows for a fairly high polygon density, making scenes look great while also running well on all recent GPUs. We have also developed techniques that can help balance tessellation workloads by doing a limited amount of pre-tessellation in vertex shaders, which can help to reduce the impact of bottlenecks in the rendering pipeline.

As gamers, we know that you just want a game that plays well. At AMD, we are committed to delivering the best possible gaming experience for all gamers, not just those using AMD hardware. To that end, we are continuing our work with developers of DirectX® 11 games to help them use tessellation in the most efficient way possible.

It’s that time again for the AMD Catalyst™ driver update!  We have been getting great comments and feedback from the community because of this blog site.  Please continue to send us your feedback as we do review them all*.

*IF you are having technical issues with the AMD Catalyst™ driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.

Here is what is new this month!

Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 10.11 driver for Windows® release include:

Performance Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 10.11 release:

Here are examples of performance that we have noted in our labs.  Your results may vary depending on the model, screen resolution, anti-aliasing, and whether you are using AMD CrossfireX™ technology.

Battleforge™

• Performance increases up to 3% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series using single GPU and CrossFireX configurations with anti-aliasing disabled.

STALKER – Call of Pripyat™ benchmark:

• Performance increases up to 5% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series using single GPU and CrossFireX configurations.

Resolved issue highlights:

• Enabling AMD OverDrive^TM through the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center for single display systems no longer results in GPU clocks running at high levels in non-GPU intensive scenarios
• Mouse cursor no longer flickers and disappears in World of Warcraft when hardware cursor is enabled when playing in Stereo 3D mode
• Primary display no longer blanks out when playing World in Conflict Soviet Assault DX10 with Dual Monitor enabled in AMD CrossFireX™ mode
• AMD CrossFireX™ no longer becomes disabled in Battlefield Bad Company 2 after performing a task switch
• The “Contrast” value for the display is no longer set to zero after AMD CrossFireX™ is disabled for the first time
• Alien blood is now rendered properly in Aliens vs Predator with Anti-Aliasing enabled

Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ driver for Linux^® release include:

Resolved issue highlights

• Invalid position values for specified size  with aticonfig are accepted and updated in xorg.conf
• Cursor unable to enter task bar area when certain rotations are applied
• Initial rotation results in Xserver crash during startup

Hotfix driver:

We’ve also recently posted the AMD Catalyst 10.10e hotfix driver (AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series users should use this driver; AMD Catalyst 10.12 will add full support for the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series next month):

Note! This hotfix is provided as is and is not supported by AMD. It has not completed full AMD testing and is only a driver update.

Download AMD Catalyst 10.10e Here: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/gpu88-catalyst-10-10e-hotfix.aspx

AMD Catalyst 10.10e Hotfix includes the following features and enhancements:

• The ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series GPU’s now support the new AMD Catalyst AI user interface that was previously only available on the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series GPU’s

• The ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series GPU’s now support Morphological Anti-Aliasing

• Fixed cases where Morphological Anti-Aliasing was not being correctly applied to games (very intermittently)

• OpenGL 4.1 beta support

• Support for the new Morphological Anti-Aliasing feature

• Dead Rising 2 – Crossfire profile (Resolves negative scaling)

AMD CrossFire Performance Improvement for:

o   Metro 2033

o   F1 2011 – (DirectX^® 9 version)

o   Fallout New Vegas

Performance optimizations for systems with an AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 and AMD Radeon HD 6850 series of graphics products installed

o   Aliens versus Predator performance enhancements

o   Star Craft 2 performance enhancements

o   OpenGL performance enhancements – gains can be seen in Prey, Quake Wars: Enemy Territories, and Heaven v2

Support for additional Stereo 3D-capable displays:

o   Viewsonic V3D241wm-LED

o   3D Projectors

For more information on AMD Catalyst™ 10.11 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the AMD Catalyst™ 10.11 release notes.

To download the AMD Catalyst™ 10.11 driver, click here.

Till Next Month,

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

In Aliens vs. Predator™, DirectX^® 11’s geometry tessellation feature is used to more accurately depict H.R. Giger’s famous Alien design. Through the use of a variety of adaptive schemes, applying tessellation only when and where it is necessary, frame rates are kept as high as possible while giving gamers increased visual detail.

Your DirectX^® 11-enabled ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 series hardware is also designed to allow for higher quality, smoother and more natural looking shadows. These DirectX^® 11-enabled advanced shadows are also designed to render high-quality shadows, with smoother and artifact-free edges, something that wouldn’t be possible in games that only support a lower level of DirectX^®.

The new benchmark is the latest tool to put your ATI Radeon™ hardware through its paces and is available for download now – happy testing!

Evan Groenke is part of the Global Communications Team at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

*IF you are having technical issues with the ATI Catalyst™ driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.

Another great release of ATI Catalyst ™ drivers is upon us.    As you will see below, several key features and awesome improvements have been added to this month’s driver release.

Let’s take a look at what is new this month!

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 10.3 release includes:

New Features

ATI Catalyst™ support for ATI Mobility Radeon™ Premium Graphics solutions

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ introduces support for the production version of Microsoft ® Windows® 7 and Windows Vista® for notebooks featuring the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 2000 Series, ATI Mobility Radeon ™  HD 3000 Series, and ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, and planned support future ATI Mobility Radeon ™ products.  
• Supported by most major OEM and ODM notebook manufacturers 

ATI Catalyst™ Control Center – ATI Eyefinity technology enhancements¹

• Display Bezel Compensation
  • Easy-to-use wizard  shows users how to adjust their display layout to remove the pixels occupied by their display bezels²
• Per-Display Color Adjust
  • Individual Color, Brightness,  and Contrast controls
• Multiple ATI Eyefinity Technology Groups
  • Create more than one ATI Eyefinity group from multiple displays
• Improved Display Configuration switching
  • Support for ATI Eyefinity groups and the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center profile manager
  • Easy to toggle between cloned and extended desktop modes

ATI Catalyst™ support for 3D Stereoscopic glasses

• AMD has updated its Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors such as iZ3D to output stereo L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye)

For more information on ATI Catalyst™ 10.3 (for Windows® 7, Windows Vista®, Windows® XP, and Linux® versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst™ 10.3 release notes.

To download the driver, click here.

ATI Catalyst™ 10.3 driver is getting some great feedback from press!  I have included some links below that showcase some of positive press we have received so far with our preview of ATI Catalyst™ 10.3:

HardOCP: here

TweakTown: here

Legit Reviews: here

Till Next Month,

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

1 ATI Eyefinity technology can support multiple displays using a single enabled ATI Radeon™ graphics card – the number of displays may vary by board design and you should confirm exact specifications with the applicable manufacturer before purchase. ATI Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort™ connectors, and/or certified DisplayPort™ adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort™ or Mini-DisplayPort™ connector, are required.

2 Bezel compensation is available only for sets of monitors that have pixel resolution and density within a 5% tolerance of each other

It’s that time again for the ATI Catalyst™ driver update!  We have been getting great comments and feedback from the community because of this blog site.  Please continue to send us your feedback as we do review them all*.

*IF you are having technical issues with the ATI Catalyst driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.

Here is what is new in ATI Catalyst 9.12:

ATI Catalyst™ support for DirectCompute 10.1

• This release of ATI Catalyst provides full support for DirectCompute 10.1 for the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 4700 Series for both single card and configurations supporting ATI CrossFireX™ technology.

OpenGL 3.2 extension support

• This release of ATI Catalyst provides support for OpenGL 3.2 extension support on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series GPUs.

• The following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.2 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.12:
  • Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.50.
  • BGRA vertex component ordering (GL_ARB_vertex_array_bgra).
  • Drawing commands allowing modification of the base vertex index (GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex).
  • Shader fragment coordinate convention control (GL_ARB_fragment_coord_conventions).
  • Provoking vertex control (GL_ARB_provoking_vertex).
  • Seamless cube map filtering (GL_ARB_seamless_cube_map).
  • Multisampled textures and texture samplers for specific sample locations (GL_ARB_texture_multisample).
  • Fragment depth clamping (GL_ARB_depth_clamp).
  • Geometry shaders (GL_ARB_geometry_shader4).
  • Fence sync objects (GL_ARB_sync).
  • transform_feedback2
  • texture_cubemap_array

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.12 driver release for Linux include:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

• This release of ATI Catalyst driver release for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

• RedFlag DT6.0 SP3
• SLED and SLES 10SP3

ATI Catalyst Control Center™ –  Linux Edition:  Displays pages: user interface enhancements

• This release of ATI Catalyst driver release for Linux introduces support for a number of new display features found in the ATI Catalyst Control Center –  Linux Edition, highlights include:
  • CRT/VGA settings
  • TV settings
  • Component Video settings
  • Support for display projectors

• New Size and Position page
• New HDTV page

• New option for “Automatic setting for Size and Position adjustment”
• New image quality settings:  “flicker removal” and “S-Video/Composite sharpness”

• New Scaling Options page – new Overscan / Underscan controls
• New custom mode support for 576 modes

• Enables quick display configuration of display projectors

For more information on ATI Catalyst 9.12 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst 9.12 release notes.

To download the Catalyst 9.12 driver, click here.

In addition, the ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix driver will be made available today!

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release includes:

Support for the OpenCL™ GPU component of the ATI Stream SDK v2.0

• The ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release provides full support for GPU acceleration of OpenCL when used in conjunction with the ATI Stream SDK v2.0.   This feature is supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5970 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series, ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series and the AMD FireStream™ 9200 Series of products.

For more information about ATI Stream technology and OpenCL, please visit. http://www.amd.com/stream

Support for ATI CrossFireX™ technology on configurations employing ATI Eyefinity technology configurations The ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release provides support for ATI CrossFireX™ technology on configurations employing ATI Eyefinity technology, allowing users to take advantage of their additional GPUs for increased gaming performance when driving high resolution displays

• Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5970 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Support for DisplayPort audio

• The ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release adds support for DisplayPort audio for DisplayPort panels

Fixes the following issues:

• Resident Evil 5 – Performance drop during the opening cinematic
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare – Negative performance observed with a configuration supporting  ATI CrossFireX™ technology when using the thermal scope
• Wheelman – Game freezes while loading the game menu
• Flashing in various OpenGL titles – City of Heroes, Enemy Territories: Quake Wars, and Chronicles of Riddick
• Heaven benchmark (DirectX 9 mode) – Grass flicker and white boarders observed around the edges

Grab the hotfix driver : Here

Till Next Month, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll. 
Have you wondered what all the hype around Microsoft Windows 7 and DirectX 11 is all about? We will shed some light and answer some of those questions in this blog.

Let’s start with Windows7, everyone, including my own mother, is talking about this amazing operating system. Microsoft is rumoured to be launching the successor to Windows Vista in late October. What does it mean to you the PC user?

I cover my experience with Windows 7 in this blog; in a nutshell, the experience has been fantastic. It seems that Microsoft has worked out all the kinks and quirkiness of Windows Vista and are about to launch an incredible OS for the PC. Windows 7 (when compared to Windows Vista) is designed to offer the user a much more refined experience, smaller footprint, faster response times, long battery life and a much more visually intense and enjoyable PC experience.

Wrapped up in all the new Windows 7 OS splendour is a new API (Application programming Interface) called DirectX 11. Basically, the API allows developers to program software that uses a standard set of terms to communicate with the libraries and the OS. Think of it as game developers have some new toys to play with inside Windows to allow them to deliver better software.

DirectX has been around since 1995 with the launch of Windows95, a full history can be found here.

Let me break down the features and benefits of DirectX 11 -- the main features being:
-Tessellation  -- Multithreaded Rendering  - DirectCompute

Tessellation is a technology that has been around for a few GPU (graphics processing unit) generations. AMD has had Tessellation support since 2001, which was then called Truform; we also implemented Tessellation in the XBOX 360 GPU, then codenamed “Xenos”. Tessellation is a feature which increases the number of polygons in an image. Basically, Tessellation enables a more lifelike image, both of objects and landscape. Back in the day characters who were CG (computer generated) looked very blocky, almost cartoon like; with the use of Tessellation, developers are now able to significantly increase the number of triangles to draw an image, thus creating a more lifelike quality in games.

Multithreaded Rendering is a feature which allows DirectX to be processed via multiple CPU threads. This means that a dual-, triple- or quad-core CPU can have a higher utilization across all cores than DirectX APIs in the past. Historically the OS would load up a single core for commands to the GPU, in essence creating an overload on the first core and under utilizing the additional cores. With only one core issuing commands to a GPU, we have seen CPUs hold back the potential performance of the GPU. With Multithreaded Rendering, DirectX will take better advantage of all the available cores. This should result in a better experience for the multi-core user because of a faster processing pipeline and increased scaling.

DirectCompute is a feature which allows access to the shader cores/pipeline for Stream Computing (graphics acceleration) type applications and physics acceleration. One of the biggest technology breakthroughs of the past 5 years has been the notion that processing can be moved from the traditional CPU to the much more parallel GPU. Simply put, the CPU manages tasks sequentially; it accomplishes a task then moves on to the next task in a very orderly fashion and with tremendous speed. Today’s CPUs can work at speeds of up to 108.8 GigaFLOPS (Floatingpoint Operations Per Second).

A GPU is designed to work with many slower cores in parallel, giving a much wider vector -meaning a wider road for more cars to travel on -- than a CPU. This allows tasks to be completed faster if the program or software is developed to take advantage of many-many cores, albeit slower ones. Today’s GPUs can work at speeds up to 1.36 TeraFLOPS, giving the GPU a significant (almost 11 times faster) advantage when the proper software is run. This advantage truly delivers on the processing capabilities of Stream Computing. DirectCompute allows easier access to the GPU’s many cores for parallel processing; if the user is running applications that take advantage of Stream Computing then the performance experience increases considerably. We are seeing transcoding as the first type of task that is seeing tremendous benefit using Stream Computing. This means if you are an avid HD video or music user you will benefit when converting files to play on your laptop or iPod type devise; Stream Computing can significantly cut down the wait-time for enjoying your converted media.

Now, if you are a gamer you undoubtedly will be asking me “What games are going to support DirectX 11″? This is always a tightrope to walk for us as we are unable to pre-announce our technology partners titles and the specs around those titles; still, we want to give the consumer confidence that we’ve been assured there will be substantial titles in the market that take full advantage of your ATI Radeon DirectX 11-compliant graphics card. So, as this blog is published, here are the future DirectX 11 games we can talk about:

Dirt2 by Codemasters
BattleForge by EA
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat by GSC Game World

- Check out this early spoiler for Dirt 2 -

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZAwniLT22U

Game developers discuss the benefits of DirectX11

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghazN5L7Ncw

Windows7 and DirectX11 are right around the corner, as is the newest ATI Radeon family of graphics cards. As always, it’s our goal to blur the lines between reality and what is rendered. I believe we have made a major leap towards crossing that chasm with our ATI RadeonTM HD 5000 series products and their support for DirectX 11.

Tessellation -- Minimized

With Tessellation -- Maximized!

Between now and the launch of Windows 7 and DirectX 11, we will continue to uncover the technical details, as well as the visual implications, for the user experience.

At the time of this blog, AMD will be the first GPU vendor to market with a fully compliant and enabled DirectX 11 graphics product. So don’t be fooled by claims in the market about DX10 GPU’s supporting DirectX 11….

My good friend Tim Smalley from bit-tech.net has a great in-depth article on DirectX 11: A look at what’s coming – Check it out.

Cheers!

Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton

Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Microsoft, and those of us in the graphics business, have been openly talking about DirectX 11 for around a year now – in fact, to be honest we’ve been talking about it since even before Windows Vista shipped at the very end of 2006!  It takes a long time to put together a new version of DirectX and there are often tough decisions about what to leave out while finalizing any one version.  So we often agree that the parts which are being left out in the ‘current’ version will find their way into the next version. 

So let’s take a good look at what’s in DirectX 11.  I’m not going to go into painful technical detail; instead, I will try to look at the consequences of those technical details.  One important note, unlike DirectX 10, DirectX 11 isn’t tied to Windows 7, so those of you sporting a Windows Vista system will get to reap the rewards as well.

There are three main areas of impact in DirectX 11:

1.  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 Radeon^TM HD 2000 series right up to the latest ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000 series cards today).

[An example of tessellation giving characters more definition.]

2.  Games programmers will also be given a radically new way to program for AMD graphics chips. The second new beast in the menagerie is the excitingly named “Compute Shader”. It allows games programmers to treat the GPU in a much less graphics-oriented way; indeed, they can almost treat it like a highly parallel CPU. [The buzzword for this is "GPGPU" , see http://blogs.amd.com/play/2008/11/05/the-gpgpu-chronicles/ for details.]

Up until DirectX 10.1 a graphics programmer always had to think in terms of triangles – but the compute shader changes that and allows the programmer a much freer expression of their thoughts.  If you try to solve a problem of artificial intelligence or physics, you probably don’t think the problem through in terms of triangles.  So the compute shader is a more natural way for the programmer to approach his or her task.  On top of that it allows access to some of the features that would otherwise have been hidden away inside our present and future chips and for that reason it will often allow significantly more efficient implementations than heretofore (that means “higher frame rates” to you and me ).

3.  DirectX has been sliced and diced and the internals redesigned to ensure that it is much more efficient at using the horsepower present in multiple CPU cores. This will be a huge win on chips like our AMD Phenom^TM II quad and triple core processors [http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_15331_15332,00.html] and it will provide the opportunity for both higher frame rates and games which are more realistic, because they contain dramatically more detail.

There are numerous other, less important changes aimed to make the games programmer’s tasks easier.  Some so small that you’d have to be a games programmer to care, some (like improved texture compression) are big enough to help out significantly with performance in corner cases.

Quite often you get to hear rather bland but optimistic statements about the future versions of DirectX.  “It’ll be faster and better” – but you don’t get to hear much in the way of substantial justification.

This time around I hope it’s abundantly clear – I predict that:

• We’ll see higher frame rates because the way DirectX 11 uses CPUs will be more efficient.
• We’ll see higher frame rates because games developers will be able to use our GPUs more like CPUs.
• We’ll see smoother, more realistic characters and more realistic terrain as we move away from blocky polygonal representations to the kind that are used in movies.
• And a side-benefit, that will help PC gaming generally, is that the new version is easier to use, so it will help to keep game development costs down.

On top of that there’s something worth mentioning here about the evolution of computer graphics.  Every generation of DirectX has been designed to be an improvement upon the previous generation.  We always make a point of including all the old functionality (so that you can run any of your existing games).  This time is no exception; the nearest thing to DirectX11 is DirectX10.1.  And it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I can’t resist mentioning that this means that owners of ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000 series graphics have a distinct advantage, since AMD is the only major supplier of graphics chips that supports DirectX 10.1 http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd4800/index.html .  DirectX 10.1 is the closest you can get to DirectX 11 until Windows 7 ships.

When it does ship though, get ready for a significantly improved gaming experience thanks to the combination of DirectX 11 features enabled by phenomenal new DirectX 11 hardware from AMD.

Richard Huddy is Sr. Manager Developer Relations at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.