DirectX 9.0L Is The Next DirectX?

TheInquirer.net reported earlier that Microsoft plans to introduce a new DirectX 9.0 version. This time they claim to have managed to get the name and the company plans to call it DirectX 9.0L.

You will remember that Nvidia was pressing Microsoft to call its last revision of DirectX, DirectX 9.1 but MS decided to simply add a letter c to its existing DirectX 9.0 name. This currently available DirectX 9.0c features support for ShaderModel 3.0 and Nvidia thought that upgrade from ShaderModel 2.0 would deserve at least a 9.1 suffix.

Now the Vole plans to do the same thing. It will call its next generation DirectX featuring ShaderModel 4.0, DirectX 9.0L. They don't know when the company plans to make this new API architecture available but expects that this will happen sometime trough 2006. It's still too early to shift to ShaderModel 4.0 as Nvidia and ATI won't have ShaderModel 4.0 hardware until the middle of 2006.