The version of DirectX introduced in Windows 7 in late 2009 and also available for Vista. With three new tessellation stages, DirectX 11 was a significant upgrade to DirectX 10, and it was compatible with DirectX 10 applications. A major new feature was Compute Shader, which enabled the developer to access the parallel processing features of the GPU for image and video rendering, as well as general-purpose computing. Compute Shader provided a new processing model that supported myriad data structures and algorithms. See
tessellation,
GPGPU,
DirectX 12 and
DirectX.