DirectX 11 Is Official

 

The original rumor was true as Microsoft has officially announced DirectX 11. Details below:

Features include new shader technology that begins to allow developers to position GPUs as more general-purpose parallel processors, rather than being dedicated solely to graphics processing; better multi-threading capabilities; and hardware-based tesselation.

Said newly promoted Microsoft’s Entertainment Business Division CTO Chris Satchell during a Gamefest keynote, “We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders.”

DirectX 11 will be backwards compatible with DirectX10/9. Though with the lack of DirectX10 applications/game and the miserable adoption rate (due to consolization), it’ll be interesting to see how well DirectX 11 is received.

Ignition Entertainment Licenses Unreal Engine 3.0

Ignition Entertainment is the latest studio to acquire an Unreal Engine 3.0 license to use in their upcoming multi-platform “groundbreaking” FPS.

Press Release: 

Ignition Entertainment, Ltd. (www.ignitionent.com), a UTV enterprise, today announced that the company entered into an agreement with Epic Games to license Unreal Engine 3 for its upcoming, groundbreaking FPS, currently under development at its Florida studio.

“Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 is an extremely versatile engine,” said Jeremy Stieglitz, Game Director and Lead Designer, Ignition Florida. “So when deciding on technology for Ignition Florida’s first next-generation video game, there was no questioning that Unreal Engine 3 is the way to go.” Read more

Crysis: Warhead to be the LAST PC Only title from Crytek

In an interview with Next-Gen, Harald Seeley of Crytek has unveiled that Crysis: Warhead will be the last PC-only title from Crytek. Future titles from the german developer will be (sigh) multiplatform.

When Cevat said we would not create new PC exclusives, he was referring to any new projects we will start in the future.  Of course Warhead has been under development for quite some time, and we had no desire or intention to disappoint our loyal PC fans.  So, after some careful consideration, we decided to continue our support for the PC Crysis franchise with this release.  But yes, all new franchises we develop in the future will be created with a cross platform strategy in mind.  Of course we’re also aware of the danger of making a game that is only designed for one particular audience and platform, and failing to meet the needs of the others.  So any game we create will always offer something unique on each platform and will be carefully tuned to both the capabilities and strengths of that platform, as well as the intended audience.