We were quite surprised when we saw an AMD chap going on the record in his presentation and telling us and the rest of the world on page 24 that DirectX 10.1 is an incremental update to DirectX 10.

This is nothing new to us, but AMD is trying to promote the fact that DirectX 10.1 is the most important thing in the world and then you have the people with engineering backgrounds telling you the real truth about the nature of DirectX 10.1.

AMD has had little success with pushing DirectX 10.1, simply because Nvidia controls most of the developer market with programs such as The way It's Meant To Be Played. Furthermore, ATI is telling the developers that DirectX 10.1 is there to “fix DX10 unorthogonalities” but it also talks about some performance advantages of DirectX 10.1 and some gains you’ll have with multi-pass reduction; and that you will be able to do more with less.

Last, but not least, on page 26 of the presentation AMD's developer relation team is advising developers to “ensure the DX10 API is used optimally” and to “use DX10.1 if supported,” which is not really a blasting endorsement of the unique features you have.

You can take a look at the presentation here and if AMD takes it down, we have a copy.