Death of DirectX: an epic interview with Tim Sweeney
 

I think DirectX 9 was the last graphics API that really mattered. DirectX 9 was a revolution: completely programmable shaders of unlimited length with full floating-point precision support. Compared with the fixed-function, 8-bit pipeline it replaced, it was revolutionary. Everything since has been incremental, and kind of backward-looking.

So, DirectX 10 takes DirectX 9 and adds some weird fixed-function components on top of it, which fit in a very particular place in the pipeline, and are hard to use. I'm not saying that it's entirely unwarranted, but I think that DirectX 9 was the last game-changing step in the graphics APIs, and the next non-incremental step will be the move back to programming languages.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed...-interview.ars