Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental update of Direct3D 10.0 which is shipped with, and requires,
Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
[8] This release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality.
[9] It also adds support for parallel cube mapping and requires that the video card supports Shader Model 4.1 or higher and 32-bit floating-point operations. Direct3D 10.1 still fully supports Direct3D 10 hardware, but in order to utilize all of the new features, updated hardware is required.
[10] As of November 29, 2008, only ATI's HD4xxx and HD3xxx series and S3's chrome 4xx GTX series of GPUs are fully compliant, Nvidia has yet to release a DX10.1 compliant card. All future DX11 hardware will also support DX10.1 in order to be DX11 compliant.