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Among the major new features, DirectX 11 will introduce a shader technology that "lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor," according to the chief technical officer of Microsoft's Entertainment Business Division, Chris Satchell.

The company also revealed that DX11 will bring support for tessellation, allowing for smoother models, and multi-threaded resource handling to exploit multi-core machines.

As with DirectX 10, the latest version will only be compatible with Vista and later versions of Windows, although unlike its controversial forbear DirectX 11 will be backwards compatible with DirectX 10 graphics cards.

Microsoft also claims that DirectX 11 will bring some new features to DirectX 10 compatible hardware, though the company kept the details close to its chest.