The old standard that PC gamers know and love, DirectX, is going to upgraded to version 11 eventually -- but perhaps a bit sooner than you might have guessed.

It looks like Microsoft's official unveiling of DX 11 is coming before the end of the month. According to "sources," the first announcement will come at Gamefest 2008 on July 22nd and 23rd. Gamefest is a gaming technology conference that will be taking place in Seattle. Not all that much is known about DirectX 11, but is said to include improvements in multithreaded rendering, tesselation and displacement, and the new specs for Shader Model 5.0.

Further details on DirectX 11 will be coming in NVISION, the massive NVIDIA sponsored visual computing and gaming event, happening in California near the end of August.

But don't worry that your video card will be obsolete soon -- it'll be a fairly long time before any video cards supporting DX11 come out, and an even longer time still until any games come out that support the API.

Hopefully DX11 will become a new standard for developers to work with -- unlike DX10. It has been such a long time now since DX10 has come out, and if you don't have a capable DX10 card, don't worry, you haven't missed a thing. DX10 has been pretty much a non-event, with slow adoption, and hardly and support from developers primarily because of the lack of DX10 capable hardware out on the market, and consumers not wanting to have to 'upgrade' to Vista. Technology writers have been hard pressed to find nary a small difference between DX9 and DX10 versions of games -- though marketers have been happy to exaggerate how massive the difference is, in many titles.  

The state of DX10 has also been further confused with ATI supporting DX10.1, and NVIDIA not supporting DX10.1, which has further increased the amount of effort developers must subject themselves to in order to take advantage of the new API.