"We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible," Robison said.

He also said that Windows 7 could speed up conversion of video for playback on portable devices. Users will be able to drag and drop video from PCs to portable devices, with DirectX 11 enabling video conversion on the fly.

While Microsoft has built native DirectX 11 support in Windows 7, users will benefit only with capable hardware. AMD in June showed off a prototype DirectX 11 graphics processing unit, but is yet to formally announce a product.

In a posted Thursday,

AMD's Robin Maffeo, a Microsoft alliance manager, wrote "there are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is released."