A lot of buzz surrounds the upcoming release of DirectX 11, a collection of application programming interface for the Microsoft Windows platform which was first announced at last year’s Gamefest event in Seattle (read DirectX 11 confirmed). The beta of Windows 7 was already released with DirectX 11 albeit a technical preview and not the final version of it.
Microsoft released an update to the DirectX End-User Runtimes in the last days including a release of the DirectX Software Development Kit containing a Direct3D 11 Technical Preview for the Windows 7 operating system. This release contains the following new features and tools:
- Technical Preview of Direct2D
Direct2D is a hardware-accelerated, immediate-mode, 2-D graphics API that provides high performance and high quality rendering for 2-D geometry, bitmaps, and text. The Direct2D API is designed to interoperate well with Direct3D and GDI. This technical preview allows developers to evaluate the API and write simple applications, with some of the more advanced functionality possible on properly configured machines.
- Technical Preview of DirectWrite
DirectWrite provides support for high-quality text rendering, resolution-independent outline fonts, and full Unicode text and layout support, and much, much more.
- Technical Preview of DXGI 1.1
DXGI 1.1 builds on DXGI 1.0 and will be available on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. DXGI 1.1 adds several new features.
The DirectX Software Development Kit can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft homepage.
