DirectX 11 announced at Gamefest

As expected, Microsoft has announced DirectX 11 at its US Gamefest event.

The software will be backwards compatible with DX10 hardware. There doesn't appear to have been a release date announced for it.

“We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders," said XNA boss Chris Satchell, speaking in his keynote at the event. "DX11 is totally compatible with DX10. There’s not that 9/10 discontinuity we created before."

Satchell also explained the delay in switching from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture is a software problem.

“We’ve been shipping 64-bit CPUs on the hardware side for awhile,” he said. “We’re not at the point where the 64-bit OS is catching up. I think we are [there] in the next six to eight months.”

Thanks Gaming Today and Gama.