Thursday, July 24, 2008

Games For Windows Live Free To All + DX11

Snubbing E3 Microsoft announced at their own GameFest gaming conference that, as of now, Games For Windows Live (the PC equivalent of Xbox Live) multiplayer features are now free to all.

"The move to free means that achievements, enhanced "truskill" matchmaking, cross-platform play with the Xbox 360, voice and text chat, friends lists, are all now free to Windows gamers. This change to free is for all Games for Windows LIVE titles, past and future."

Also at their love fest, Microsoft announced Direct X 11.

The company calls DirectX 11 a "big step forward for gaming, adding features onto existing DirectX 10".

Key components of DirectX 11, will include:

  • Full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows
  • Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
  • New compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
  • Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines
  • Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close
That's great and all but will we ever see games using it? There are only 3 games I can think of off the top of my head that use DX10 and the only one I played is Crysis. Meh... let's wait and see.

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