ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES will bring its latest graphics hardware based on DirectX 11 to laptops by early next year, aiming to make graphics in Windows 7 smoother and more realistic.

AMD will first offer graphics cards with DirectX 11 for desktops, but it will deliver them for laptops early next year, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's products group, during an interview at an event. The first laptops will get support for DirectX 11 through discrete graphics cards, and the technology will trickle down to integrated graphics cards by 2011.

The company has already demonstrated ATI Radeon discrete graphics cards for desktops with DirectX 11 capabilities, though the company has not announced release dates for the products. The desktop products will be out by the time Microsoft Windows 7 launches.

DirectX 11 is a set of APIs that will come with Windows 7 and should allow for more realistic images and 3D experiences with games and movies. It will let game developers create realistic images through improved 3D modelling and faster frame rates. A feature called "Compute Shader" is designed to harness the parallel-processing capabili-ties of GPUs to improve gaming on PCs.

The technology will boost the performance of online and high-definition video playback, and will let users convert video clips by dragging and dropping them from PCs to portable devices.

It will also help Windows 7 recognize multicore systems, and speed up multimedia, Bergman said. The tools distribute tasks over multiple CPUs and GPUs for simultaneous execution. This could reduce the strain on the CPU while oilloading more tasks to the graphics processors.