All for Windows 7
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.