by John Gillooly
Opinion: NVIDIA is set to launch its first piece of DirectX 11 hardware, but game developers are still heavily focused on the five year old DirectX 9 API.

Over the past decade some of the most exciting developments in processors have come not from the CPU makers but the graphics guys. Graphics hardware has evolved significantly from the original dream of implementing OpenGL in hardware to the multicore parallel processing chips that drive today’s offerings.

The big question that hangs over the industry is whether gamers actually need the kind of performance delivered by the latest hardware such as NVIDIA’s long awaited Fermi GPU.

Despite constant delays, the Fermi architecture, also know by the GF100 moniker, is getting closer to release. With current estimates putting it around April 12th, this is a generational shift in NVIDIA’s hardware design. At the moment a huge number of details are still up in the air, such as card speeds and the number of processing cores that will ship. This hasn’t stopped the hype machine as excitement builds over NVIDIA’s offering in the DirectX 11 space.

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