Speaking at its Gamefest 2008 event last summer, MS said that DX11 will introduce new shader technology that "lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor."
The company also revealed that DX11 will sport multi-threaded resource handling to exploit multi-core machines, support for tessellation and full Vista support. We're sure that's getting video nerds somewhere excited.
Of course most interesting to the majority of PC gamers is that you won't have to buy a new video card to run DX11, unlike DX10 which was only supported by new, top-of-the-line video cards upon release. MS said that both DX10 and DX10.1 hardware would support DX11.
