The version of DirectX introduced in Windows 7 in late 2009 and also available for Vista. With three new tessellation stages, DirectX 11 is a significant upgrade to DirectX 10, and it is compatible with DirectX 10 applications. A major new feature is Compute Shader, which enables the developer to access the parallel processing features of the GPU for image and video rendering, as well as general-purpose computing. Compute Shader provides a new processing model that supports myriad data structures and algorithms. See
GPGPU,
DirectX 10 and
DirectX.