DirectX 11 to be Unveiled

Microsoft are to demonstrate DirectX 11 at this years XNA Gamefest, held on 22/23 July in Seattle. This should be available towards the end of 2009, just before the next major release of Windows:

"This year’s Gamefest will be built around DirectX 11, to relight the fire of the multimedia and gaming API. The software is scheduled to be made available for Windows Vista and Windows 7, but Microsoft wants to avoid the same mistakes it made with DirectX 10.


According to our sources in the game development world, DirectX 10 failed to capture hearts and minds of developers, since Windows Vista and the development environment were just too unstable to use them as a development foundation, we were told. Vista came with a "passing the cost to the consumer" approach in term of hardware performance as the operating system was burdened with DRM in too many stages."