Microsoft will start talking about DirectX 11 in less than two weeks. Sources have confirmed that Microsoft game technology conference, previously known as Meltdown and now renamed to Gamefest 2008, will be the place where Microsoft plans to officially announce DirectX 11.

This conference takes place on the 22nd and 23rd of June in Seattle, Washington and it will set you back $550 if you register online.

The big feature of DirectX 11 is Tessellation/Displacement while it's also been heard that Multithreaded Rendering and Compute Shaders are part of it. DirectX 11 also brings Shader model 5.0 but not many details are known about it.

Further details on DirectX 11 will be coming in NVISION, the massive NVIDIA sponsored visual computing and gaming event, happening in California near the end of August.

But don't worry that your video card will be obsolete soon -- it'll be a fairly long time before any video cards supporting DX11 come out, and an even longer time still until any games come out that support the API.



Hopefully DX11 will become a new standard for developers to work with -- unlike DX10. It has been such a long time now since DX10 has come out, and if you don't have a capable DX10 card, don't worry, you haven't missed a thing.