AMD Demos DirectX 11-Capable ATI Graphics Card 107
An anonymous reader writes "Today at a press conference in Taiwan, AMD demonstrated the world's first GPU capable of DirectX 11 technology. The demonstrations shows the major improvements DirectX 11 gives us over DirectX 10 and also shows us what AMD has in store for an ATI Graphics Card coming out before the end of 2009 capable of DirectX 11. AMD shows three primary features of DirectX 11: a tessellator, which allows for less blocky and more fluid and realistic details; compute shaders which allows for less restricted programming; and finally, how DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores."
Re:Linux drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't seem to have stopped nVIDIA from making a pretty solid driver for Linux.
nVidia basicly overrode the lower third or so of X11 (it's a big function pointer table) and wrote their own implementation, ATI did the same except with less success. AMD/Intel is now trying to invent a proper open source stack with graphics execution manager (GEM) for memory management, kernel mode setting (KMS) for flicker free boots and more, low-level state tracking framework called Gallium3D to expose modern shaders, better direct rendering interface (DRI2), redirected direct rendering (RDR) and various other improvements but you're talking about things only 1-2 years old. nVidia has succeeded yes but for most intents and purposes they wrote the whole thing themselves, There's a reason it's a sore point for open source fanatics, it's not merely a blob addon it basicly ripped out a whole chunk of open source, said "not good enough" and replaced it with their own blob.
Re:Will programmers be able to utilize? (Score:2, Informative)
That would produce some bad looking results, as the driver wouldn't know the difference between a model that is intentionally polygonal and one that is not.