DirectX 11 is the successor to DirectX 10 and 10.1, which came with Windows Vista. AMD may be the first to ship DirectX 11-equipped hardware if it launches a graphics card later this month. Nvidia has said it will support DirectX 11, but it hasn't provided a specific hardware release date.

AMD also supports the OpenCL standard, an alternative to DirectX, for which the company has released both CPU and GPU drivers. Apple uses the OpenCL standard in its current Mac OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard, to break up the execution of tasks and manage tasks over multiple cores and other resources.