When shopping or looking at specs for graphics card you will see the DirectX version that it supports (in my specific case the card supports 10). What I want to know is that when Microsoft released their new version 11, what would be stopping this card from performing at DX11 standards?
I would theorize that it is a matter of firmware on the actual graphics card itself, could this not be flashed to support the latest version? Or will this DX10 card support and run DX11 just fine, it is just the fact that Nvidia couldn't label it as such since DX11 wasn't out yet?
Anyone that has some good insight to this, let me know!
Edit: alright, if you downvote this thread or vote to have it closed… would you please explain why you think it is a 'stupid question'. I seriously am curious as to how or what the difference is between DX versions that would require a complete hardware change. GPU instruction sets are the same, the only difference in hardware is that the newer ones have faster VRAM, more stream processors, etc. So why can't a DX10 card be upgraded to support DX11?? Give me a reason.
Best Answer
The reason why DirectX 10 cards cannot be upgraded to DirectX 11 would most likely be to do with DirectX 11 mandating particular features such as a particular level of precision in mathematical operations, that kind of thing is difficult and a bit annoying to back-port onto hardware that was not designed to work with it.
This would be the same as a particular CPU not supporting new features introduced by a newer CPU, sure the new features could be emulated (and may run not too much slower than a native implementation) but the CPU itself still will not truly support the required features. A similar idea might be the possibility of emulating SSE instructions on a non-SSE processor, sure you could do it, but it's a lot of mangling and would be a lot slower than a full hardware implementation.
You may well, with custom software, get a DirectX 10 card to look as good as a DirectX 11 card and to do almost everything in a similar fashion, but all the native features or extra precision that DirectX 11 mandates would be missing and in general I think the software/emulation layer would be quite a bit slower than a full hardware approach.