JohnTyra.com

Competition is good; it encourages companies and manufacturers to make their products better so that consumers will chose their product instead. Consumers love it, businesses hate it, because we (as consumers) get more product for less money. It makes me smile. =)

So, when there are rumors of Intel’s new (CPU) chip code-named ‘Larrabee’ that has multiple cores that directly supports both OpenGL and DirectX, it makes me smile. When I hear that it will go into a graphics card first before going into a CPU and that it’s geared towards ‘high-end gaming’ it makes me put on that evil grin. This story comes from computerworld’s article about the Larrabee chip if you’d like to read more. One of the more notable items is that this will be the first time Intel has made a separate graphics card, since all of their other graphic solutions have been on-board video.

Microsoft plans to announce some of the details surrounding DirectX 11 in a few weeks at the Microsoft Game Technology Conference this month. The XNA Gamefest happens July 22nd and 23rd in Seattle, which gives game developers and hardware vendors ~plenty~ of time to get ready. Maybe too much time, since DirectX 11 is set to be released towards the end of 2009, which is roughly a year and a half from now. It must take awhile to program a game based on their new technology.

Hopefully this version of DirectX will rally more support and excitement than version 10 did, since the gaming community didn’t exactly jump on the DirectX 10 bandwagon.