http://kotaku.com/5027826/game-for [...] 1-unveiled

Seems Microsoft just announced DX11 at their latest Gamesfest conference.

Think this will have any impact on the current round of cards? Also seems that all Gold member features, which are part of their Games for Windows initiative are now free to use on PC...

No. In all "technicality" its proabbyl nothing but DX10.1b. But instead of doing the whole 9.0b, 9.0c like they did before, they are just gonna rename it to make people panic and believe there hardware is now worthless.

would current hardware be able to use the features in dx11?

Presumably yes, unless the driver is specifically handicapped to not support Directx 11 instructions...?

No, it's very unlikely current hardware can.

Current NVIDIA cards can even do 10.1 which is already out, thought current ATI cards can.

Not many developers have actually written support for 10.1 yet.

dx 11 by early next year probably, might have to wait a few months to upgrade..dammit

I think DX11 will be substantially more than that, if only for the compute shaders. Tessellation is nice too, but John Carmack is working on something with id Tech 6 that has the potential to outright trump it.

oh god now we gotta spend another 400-500 on a graphic card. no wonder many prefer consoles lol.

I would be surprised if we see DX11 hardware "early next year." It could happen though; last I heard NVIDIA was leading the charge and they obviously want to release their new cards ASAP.

Strange, although it didn't have any API support, since HD 2K series ATI has tesselation unit. With 800 SP units ready at hand, upgrade to DX11 is a matter of rewritten driver only, of course if they would do.
Probably some hackers will just "turn on" the feature for GPUs HD2K, HD3K and HD4K as soon as drivers for HD5K is published.

While this is an interesting point, AMD 3000 series gpus were written with dx 10.1 anti-aliasing single pass coding in mind - which was basically not adopted by anyone except for Ubisoft in 1 game, and Techland in another. AMD corrected this assumption by making the 4000 series gpus much more powerful - as we all know.

I think its quite likely that certain DX11 featuers will be realized in DX 10 - just like certain preconceived "dx 10 only features" were realized in DX 9 (ie: god rays) - but the jury is largely still out on that. But discussing DX 10.1 as the authoritative measure as to whether any card will support any features from an upcoming directx version is a little presumptious.

Anyways, I understand their is a large difference between a "true DX11API coded app" and a DX 10 app with some DX 11 realized features force-coded into it ~ I'm not wholly disagreeing with you, i'm just explaining my position and reasoning as to why I don't think dx 10.1 is totally pertinent to much of anything.. AMD obviously knew that DX 10.1 wasn't going to be easily adopted whether they liked it or not, so they built their new gpus to not be dependant on software optimization and it seriously paid off for them.

Well this is just another reason not to get an Nvidia card at the moment, if that is you dont want to be upgrading anytime soon.
Its all just support for and compatibility, meaning the features will be there with Vista should the developers choose to use them.
How many fully DX10 or 10.1 games are there now?
Its good that it seems that it will be compatible with DX10 and 10.1 which means no worries about the cards working to some degree. so we wont get DX11 cards and effects for windows 7 and the DX10/10.1 cards would be stuck with Vista only. which is good.
Also a plus for ATI is the tessellation support, as they have had a tessellation unit on the cards for a while so in theory will have a head start on how to make the drivers work for them.

Mactronix

So R600/RV670/RV770 can support DX11 with a driver update? *chuckles*

I thought that Nvidia was releasing a DX 10.1 compliant card next Spring?

Or did I perhaps misread something, did you have a source for that info?