This is what the new cards can offer. To think that Crysis was run on DX9/DX10, these new cards available now, can produce even better results
http://vimeo.com/6122205
New features in DX11
So what are these new features, though? One of the biggest and most relevant to today's PC is the improved multi-threading support.
Originally, Direct3D was focused on performing on a single-core CPU, making the multi-threading support fairly limited. DX11, though, has been designed to more effectively drive the graphics card, using a system with a multi-core CPU at its heart. One of the ways it does this is by supporting multiple rendering contexts.
The main computational work occurs in the primary immediate context. This dictates the timeline for work being submitted to the GPU; running alongside this are the new optional deferred contexts. These are developer-created and enables work associated with each deferred context to be carried out on a separate thread/core, then submitted to the GPU once it's ready for a new task. This is one of those backwards compatible features and so will benefit existing hardware, and should finally make quad-core CPUs more desirable for gamers beyond the willy-waving.
There's also a big change in the render pipeline, too, adding in three new stages: the hull shader, tessellator and domain shader. Listening to developers Microsoft has identified character models and animation as a key battleground in the graphics front.
Today's hugely dense polygon meshes are very memory intensive and the tessellation scheme should reduce this by allowing the work to be done in a single pass, meaning there doesn't need to be any memory in between the stages. According to Kevin Gee it should: "produce richer animations for less memory and less memory bandwidth."
Another boon for the memory consumption of today's games is the improvements in texture compression. The DX11 API gives developers two new compression formats to help with high-quality real-time rendering without sacrificing performance.
Basically, the shading and detail are much improved with the ability to produce round objects as round objects.