Our colleagues here managed to get a nice photo of a Windows 7 presentation where the big giant talked about GPU usage in Windows 7.

One of the most interesting things was the official confirmation that Windows 7 will use DirectX 10.1 API, something that works well in ATI's advantage. It doesn’t look that DirectX 11 will be ready to launch together with Windows 7 and it will probably come later even though there might be some DirectX 11 hardware to launch in 2009. 

DirectX 10.1 will help Windows 7 to scale better from low-end to high-end hardware and put it in good use, especially when it comes to user interface. Shaders will be used for the Glass and Windows 7 memory consumption is cut by 50 percent per window, something that memory manufacturers and GPU guys might not really appreciate.

Windows 7 will also have richer thumbnail animations and at the same time it comes with Media Center user interface, Video playback and Desktop Window Manager (DWM), all borrowed from Vista. We are not aware of any improvements in these areas compared to Vista.

We are sure that these features will also work on DirectX 10.0 hardware, but Microsoft has decided to promote DirectX 10.1 support this time.