It may be difficult to comprehend now, but it was only two years ago that many in the video game world had given Nintendo up for dead.  Despite the early success of the DS handheld, the company’s Gamecube had finished in distant third vs. its same generation competitors.  And with the next generation of consoles dawning, the XBox 360 was lighting up the charts and the Playstation 3 was about to become reality.  Then at E3 2006, Nintendo unveiled the Wii and the rest is history.

While nothing unveiled at this week’s Siggraph conference in Los Angeles will have that level of mainstream consumer impact, the event may feature a similar underdog story that will have far-reaching consequences for the business of video game development.

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With this one there’s a lot of techno babbel about how it will improve our lives by giving us X amount of this and Y amount of that. The long and short of it is DirectX 11 has been officially announced by Microsoft including all it’s detailed specs.

The key bits of information that can be understood by everyone is that yes it will be backwards compatible with DX 10/10.1 hardware and in addition to various graphical tweaks you would expect will be Vista only. Bad news for those of you still using XP and DirectX 9. In theory, still it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference in visual comparisons between DX9 and DX10 at the moment bar the slower framerate that comes from DX10. The interesting bit of info is that DX11 will allow for “use of the GPU as a parallel processor” which could make things interesting in the future.

No release date as yet, but we can expect it within the next 18 months or so to be in public beta if prior versions are anything to go by. If you want confirmation see the Shacknews article.

[Update] - Crytek has updated the status of their latest patch. 

inCrysis, a Crysis fansite recently hosted an IRC interview with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek and Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA. They’ve posted the transcript of the event at their site, which can be found here. While most of the stuff is technobabble, I did extract the following information from it:

• Crytek is currently collecting feedback information and will have a patch ready in 7-14 standard, human days.
• They are seeing improved performance with every driver and patch update, which is good thing. This also means that performance will be increased in upcoming patches and driver updates.

Some other things worth pointing out:

• Crysis is designed as part of a trilogy, so the abrupt ending of the singleplayer was very deliberate. That’s right - why make a spectacular story for one game when you can stretch it to fit three and make more money at the same time?
• Cevat says that if you want to get into the gaming industry, start making maps and mods and things. You’ll be noticed if you try hard enough. No guarantees here.
• Roy’s response to whether GPUs should handle advanced physics:
  • Generally we believe that the GPU can stand by itself as a powerful processor more than capable of accelerating advanced physics for today’s and future games. The GPU lends itself well to scalable, violent or destructible physics. What we need is an industry standard API that developers and the community can get behind, that isn’t proprietary. Ideally the developer can then select the GPU or other processor as they see fit. We dont have one today, and this is something we are looking into.Specifically with regard to CryEngine 2 we are in discussions with the team about this but can’t add more right now.
• You should use NVIDIA for playing Crysis.

Thanks, Crownest!

Check out the StuffWeLike.com review of Crysis.