DirectX version of a graphics card

To put it simply:
What I'm / will be missing by picking DirectX 10 card instead of DirectX 10.1 card? What I'm /will be missing if I picked DirectX 10.1 card instead of DirectX 11 card?

 

You won't be missing out on much for the 10.1 vs 10, however, DX11 has a few nice features like tessellation which kind of add to how real the textures look, and I think there are a few other features that could be useful as well.

 

Will there be a lot of DirectX 11 games to be released soon?

So DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1 card have no way to make use of DirectX 11.0 features at all (i.e. hardware limitation) regardless their system have DirectX11 installed?

 

Was i dreaming or is Microsoft going to emulate directX , so you will not have to have the latest hardware directX, to see all the eye candy in new games provided your cpu has enough grunt.

 

Well that's what I'm really wondering here...

In the past, doesn't DirectX is just an API that make use of the Graphics card hardware features to the fullest? Is it changed now so that the features itself is card-bound instead of system-bound?

 

Exactly. There is a hardware limitation. That said, for the next few years all games will have a "fallback" path so you can run DX11 or DX10 or whatever. There are still games that have DX8 fallback.

No CPU has enough grunt for that, but that is what DX does. If there's no hardware support for the operation it falls back to CPU. But then again, OpenGL and most all rendering systems do that.

Kind of. DirectX is an API, and what Microsoft does is they say that cards have to have these X features to be called DX(whatever) compatible. So ATi and NVidia build cards to support those features. It's the opposite of OpenGL, where hardware manufacturers add extensions to the API to add new features, and the Khronos Group adds certain extensions that get popular to the next version of OpenGL.

 

Yay, re-engineer GTA 4 to use DX11 effects! Textures was one of it's weakest points. Tesselation would improve to this.

 

DX11 tesselation isn't texturing. It makes procedurally more complex models, basically. Textures are still on top of the models.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2329315,00.asp

 

Tesselation, AFAIK, in essence is parameterized mesh subdivision.

 

oh, so you mean it just adds more perceptive depth to them?

 

It changes the models instead of the textures on top of the models.

 

Basically , ur better off getting a DirectX 11.0 card... u'll have the latest tech and u can play directx 11 games... and all earlier games... ur better off getting one especially if ur paying the same price...

 

You need a whole lot more power to run DX11 too, a GPU usually in my experience always has trouble running games in the max DX revision it was designed for.