ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, on Monday said that there are at least three game titles in development that will take advantage of DirectX 10.1 application programming interface. Even though three video games may add some value to the latest ATI Radeon HD graphics cards, this is hardly enough to make the DX 10.1 real popular. Still, there may be bright future for DirectX 10.1 as a part of DirectX 11.

Developers including Electronic Arts Phenomic Studio and its forthcoming fantasy online real-time strategy game Battleforge, Sega and its futuristic military real-time strategy game Stormrise, and NHN Games and its 3D role-playing game Cloud 9, all exploit DirectX 10.1 for higher gaming performance and richer visual realism.

According to officials from Phenomic Studio, the BattleForge game runs about 30% faster on DX10.1 compared to DX10 thanks to lower amount of rendering passes needed (perhaps, not in all types of scenes). The game is set to emerge already this year, but the release date is unknown.

According to Sega, DirectX 10.1 allowed the developer to create its Stormrise title “easier”, make it look “prettier” and make it work “faster”, though, no actual details were unveiled. Chris Southall, technical director of Sega Europe, said earlier this year that the video game will only have DirectX 10 and 10.1 rendering paths, hence, will not work on DirectX 9-compatible hardware and will not function under Windows XP operating system.

Currently only ATI Radeon HD 3000- and 4000-series graphics cards support DirectX 10.1, whereas Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce 8, 9 and GTX 200 only features DirectX 10 since the Santa Clara, California-based developer does not see any value in the version 10.1 superset. As a consequence, like any other DirectX super-set, the DirectX 10.1 is currently rarely supported by software developers.

In fact, the destiny of DirectX 10.1 seems to replicate the fates of DirectX 8.1 and 9.0c: video game developers would hardly embrace a new application programming interface that is supported by only one independent hardware vendor (IHV) unless the hardware developer provides certain incentives to them. In fact, the first title that took advantage of DirectX 10.1 – Assassin’s Creed made by Ubisoft Montreal – quickly lost it after, as it is widely believed, Nvidia pressured the developer of this title that belongs to the company’s The Way It’s Meant to Be Played initiative.

It should be noted that DirectX 10.1 feature-set is compulsory in DirectX 11 API, which is rumoured to be launched in 2009. Therefore, Nvidia will support DirectX 10.1 automatically once it launches DirectX 11-compatible graphics chip. Game developers realize that with the launch of the next-gen API they will have much broader park of DirectX 10.1 hardware compared to the installed base of DX11 graphics cards, hence, they may actually start development of games that take advantage of the 10.1 version of DirectX right now.