We have to give AMD a lot of credit for being the first with DirectX 9, DirectX 10.1 and now with DirectX 11. Radeon HD5870 does support DirectX 11, but when it comes to games that support it, there are still not out.

Dirt 2 PC version is postponed, and now we are hearing that Stalker DirectX 11 version is also pushed at least to January 2010. The bad thing for ATI is that Nvidia should also have its DirectX 11 card before the end of the year.

We don’t expect that the few games that will come out in the first half of 2010 will make a big difference in both visual quality and performance, as most of the games in 2009 are programmed for consoles first, and then ported to PC. The basic game, let's take Dirt 2 as an example, is finished for consoles as „DirectX 9“ as this is the best that R500 from ATI in the Xbox 360 or RSX from Nvidia in Playstation 3 can cope with.

This trend will likely continue until the next generation consoles that should get equipped with hardware capable of coping at least with DirectX 11, if not DirectX 12.