Taipei a buzz
The giant International Information Technology Show, Computex, has kicked things off. Here are a few highlights of the new products shown.
AMD has introduced and demonstrated the first DX11 capable video card. Presumably getting a head start on NVIDIA's DX11 card production, AMD was happy to show off some of the new features found in DX11, such as compute shaders, which allow your GPU to run specialized, parallel processing apps (we talked more about this here).
Intel, as always, has been keeping busy as Tweaktown took a moment to check out their new Clarkdale CPU. The code-named Clarkdale chip has a GPU on the CPU -- no need for integrated graphics; you can have it all on one chip. Clarkdale is a Socket 1136 Core i5 processor -- what the final name will be though is still up in the air. Expect Clarkdale to touch down in the Q1 2010.
Smaller and slimmer was the name of the game as Asus unveiled some slick looking portables. Pictured below, we have the EEE PC Seashell, which looks like a thinner and almost Apple-style EEE PC, and we have the UX30 notebook, which is a bit bigger and more powerful but just as slick, and we have a super-slim MS series display.
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However the compute shader support thing is important, because you can expect games in the future to take advantage of the parallel processing nature of the GPU -- which are getting to be extremely capable and fast -- for things like game AI, game physics and specialized apps.
As far as I see it, games will continue to pretty much just use DX9 for another long stretch -- my guess is until the next Microsoft console comes out.
Dx11 will bring some fancy new effect tricks, but it is more about optimization and setting the new foundation for future things...