More from Microsoft’s midweek games-related getaway, Gamefest 2008. There’s some basic info about DirectX 11. No new graphical tweaks or performance gains are mentioned in the information that I got, but they said that Direct3D 11 will be compatible with DirectX 10 hardware — my awesome hardware, for example, if I were running Vista. They’re also making multi-core support better and enabling general-purpose GPU work, so your Radeon can crunch physics or AI if it needs to.

Most interestingly, it includes:

Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time…

Hmm. If this is the same “tessellation” technology featured in Shiny’s ill-starred but pretty awesome Messiah, I think maybe I’ll pass.