AMD bringing DirectX 11 graphics to laptops in 2010

Advanced Micro Devices will bring its latest graphics hardware based on DirectX 11 to laptops by early next year, aiming to make graphics in Windows 7 smoother and more realistic.

AMD will first offer graphics cards with DirectX 11 for desktops, but it will deliver them for laptops early next year, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's products group, during an interview Thursday. The first laptops will get support for DirectX 11 through discrete graphics cards, and the technology will trickle down to integrated graphics cards by 2011.

The company has already demonstrated ATI Radeon discrete graphics cards for desktops with DirectX 11 capabilities, though the company has not announced release dates for the products. However, AMD said it would have an announcement related to DirectX 11 products on Sept. 23. The desktop products will be out by the time Microsoft Windows 7 launches on Oct. 22, AMD has said.

DirectX 11 is a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will come with Windows 7 and should allow for more realistic images and 3D experiences with games and movies. For example, DirectX 11 will let game developers create more realistic images through improved three-dimension modelling and faster frame rates. A feature called "Compute Shader" is designed to harness the parallel-processing capabilities of GPUs (graphics processing units) to improve gaming on PCs.

The technology is also designed to boost the performance of online and high-definition video playback, and it will let users instantly convert video clips simply by dragging and dropping them from PCs to portable devices.

Beyond graphics, DirectX 11 will help Windows 7 recognize multicore systems, which will speed up multimedia and other applications, Bergman said. The tools distribute tasks over multiple CPUs and GPUs for simultaneous execution. Such capabilities could reduce the strain on the CPU while offloading more tasks to the graphics processors. For example, a user could watch a high-definition DVD being processed by the GPU while the CPU handles everyday processing tasks such as virus scans, he said.

DirectX 11 is the successor to DirectX 10 and 10.1, which came with Windows Vista. AMD may be the first to ship DirectX 11-equipped hardware if it launches a graphics card later this month. Nvidia has said it will support DirectX 11, but it hasn't provided a specific hardware release date.

AMD also supports the OpenCL standard, an alternative to DirectX, for which the company has released both CPU and GPU drivers. Apple uses the OpenCL standard in its current Mac OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard, to break up the execution of tasks and manage tasks over multiple cores and other resources.