ATI demonstrates first DirectX 11 GPU

 

Gallery

By Mike Jennings

Posted on 3 Jun 2009 at 16:25

ATI will release its first GPU supporting DirectX 11 later this year, as it looks to get a leg up on rival Nvidia.

Speaking at Computex in Taipei, AMD's senior vice president Rick Bergman highlighted AMD's "long track record of delivering pioneering features" and assured customers that fully DirectX 11-compatible games will be "available at launch and shortly thereafter."

DirectX 11, Microsoft's latest graphics API, promises a trio of headline features. Principal among these is tessellation, which is already used in the Xbox 360's Xenos graphics chip, and promises to make polygon handling more efficient by adding detail at close range while sacrificing detail at distances beyond the player's sight.

Also significant is improved multithreaded rendering, which will put unused processing cores to work computing graphical tasks.

DirectX 11 should also offer better GPGPU integration. This is something Nvidia has already placed plenty of stock in with its CUDA architecture.

Though these features will certainly improve the graphical capabilities of cards, they should also offer better frame-rates from DirectX 11 products.

ATI hasn't named the new DirectX 11-compatible cards, but they're widely expected to be feature the R800 core, the successor to this year's impressive Radeon HD 4000-series cards.

While no firm specification has been revealed, it's known the new chips will be manufactured using the same 40nm process that ATI introduced in two mobile GPUs: the Radeon HD 4830 and HD 4860, earlier this year.

Nvidia, meanwhile, is thought to be preparing its next line of GPUs, the GeForce 300 series, towards the end of the year. It's rumoured these will also be DirectX 11 compatible and use GDDR5 RAM - introduced in the current generation of ATI Radeon cards - though no firm details have yet been released.