Software giant Microsoft is trying to improve the visuals in Windows 7 by working with hardware makers on Direct X11.

Windows 7 supports DirectX 11 that Microsoft says enables better gaming through more realistic graphics and faster playback of multimedia files.Microsoft has teams working with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to make sure these features end up on graphics cards. The new DirectX 11 graphics drivers help Windows 7 effectively break up tasks over multiple cores to boost application and graphics performance.

It means that Windows 7 will process video faster by unloading the task from the CPU to graphics processor cores. So far Nvidia has used DirectX compute capabilities in Windows 7 to accelerate tasks like manipulating images or playing DVDs via its graphics processing unit. An Nvidia spokesman said that Microsoft did a number of things within the operating system that allowed it to take the computing horsepower developed for visual computing and apply it to a range of tasks that have never been seen before.

AMD said DirectX 11 harnesses the massive parallel processing capabilities of GPUs to improve gaming on PCs. It is hoping that Windows 7 will push gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible. An AMD spokesman said that Windows 7 could speed up conversion of video for playback on portable devices. Users will be able to drag and drop video from PCs to portable devices, with DirectX 11 enabling video conversion on the fly.

While Microsoft has built native DirectX 11 support in Windows 7, it means that users will have to buy more hardware. AMD in June showed off a prototype DirectX 11 graphics processing unit, but is yet to formally announce a product. AMD's Robin Maffeo, a Microsoft alliance manager has said that there are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is ready.

Annoyingly this means that people who want the new graphics will have to buy a new card after Windows 7 has shipped and will not be able to get a new machine in October. Looks like I will have to put off buying a new PC until next year.