Launch in late 2009

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 22 and 23 July in Seattle, Washington and it will set you back $550 if you register online. You can find some more details about the conference here.

The big feature of DirectX 11 is Tessellation/Displacement while we also heard that Multithreaded Rendering and Compute Shaders are part of it. DirectX 11 also brings Shader model 5.0 but we don’t know many details about it.

It looks like  DirectX 11 will stick to rasterization as there is no any mentioning of Ray tracing support.

Nvidia will also talk about DirectX 11 at its Nvision event / conference in late August 2008.