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Microsoft has news of DirectX11 official with an announcement at the Gamefest 2008 developer conference in Seattle. Like DirectX 10, DX11 will be exclusive to Vista “as well as future versions of Windows.” The good news is that it is designed to be compatible with DX10 hardware. Chris Satchell, Microsoft’s Entertainment Business Division CTO, explained the decision to make DX10 incompatible with DX9 devices in his keynote speech. “We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders.” “DX11 is totally compatible with DX10. There’s not that 9/10 discontinuity we created before,” he said. 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 pointed out. “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.” Satchell did not specify Windows platforms when referring to 64-bit systems. Gamers can expect new shader technology that will allow GPUs to be used as more general-purpose parallel processors, better multi-threading capabilities; and hardware-based tesselation from DX11.