AMD's newfound zest for life has made it look for what would really, really hurt the competition. The answer? the game developers. I'm not sure if you've heard, but Blizzard has grown pretty big these days. World of WarCraft has been an indescribable success. It's been known for a while that Blizzard has been looking at implementing DirectX 10.1 with one of its future games. The fact is that it's more than one, or two.
If AMD has played its cards right, Blizzard is not only looking to implement DX10.1 support, and in best-AMD-case scenario, DX10.1-exclusive effects, with future games, but also patch current games with DX10.1 for additional performance and effects. If everything comes together for AMD, this means that StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, future World of WarCraft add-ons, and more games from Blizzard will sport DX10.1, something which NVIDIA is unable to handle hardware-wise.
That's not all though. We recently learned that AMD is looking to team up with more developers, and if there's one engine that has loved ATI hardware for a long time, it's the Valve Source engine. ATI is apparently hoping to ensnare Valve as well, and have DX10.1 support with future games like Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2 and the rest. Knowing how flexible the Source engine is, we wouldn't be surprised if current games would be patched to further boost performance and additional effects through DX10.1.
Game developers have a tendency to play it safe though, and whether there will be any exclusive effects or not remains to be seen. We see no reason for why they shouldn't implement DirectX 10.1 though, the worst that can happen is that people with compliant hardware will get a performance boost where DX10.1 makes a difference over DX10.0.
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