It feels like DirectX 10 has been launched just a few days ago, but Microsoft is already announcing DirectX 11.
The announcement was made during Microsoft's Gamefest 2008 developer conference in Seattle, where Microsoft's Entertainment Business Division CTO Chris Satchell revealed that the new architecture will "break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders".
According to Chris Satchel, DirectX 11 "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."
Fortunately for us gamers, DirectX 11 is fully compatible with all DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware currently available in market.
Just like DirectX 10, DirectX 11 won't be available for Windows XP.