Alongside their announcement that all Games for Windows LIVE Gold membership features will be free effective immediately (and retroactively for games such as Halo 2), Microsoft also discussed the upcoming DirectX 11 upgrade to their game development API (Application Programming Interface).

Fortunately, unlike the Windows Vista-exclusive features of DirectX 10, DX 11 will offer full support for Vista and all future iterations of the Windows operating system. Full compatibility with all DX 10 and 10.1 features is also expected.

On the technical side, DirectX 11 will also add increased multi-threading resources to allow machines with multiple processes to take better advantage of certain titles. New compute shader technology will be available for developers to one day use a system's GPU as a parallel processor, and tessalation, which, according to the press release Big Download received via email, "blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time," will also be available.

No information regarding a release date for DirectX 11 was made available, though most don't expect its release until sometime in 2009.