In spite an old saying, sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. Microsoft DirectX 11 application program interface (API) due later this year will enable support of compute shaders 4.0 version on DirectX 10-class graphics chips, giving them additional programmability and simplifying implementation of the new technology.

General-purpose processing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is gaining popularity slowly, but surely. Unfortunately, at present there is only one standard application programming interface – OpenCL - that supports all graphics chips available today. But apparently, DirectX 11, which will enable GPGPU, physics, artificial intelligence, etc. programming via compute shaders, will also be able to take advantage of present GPUs, albeit with some limitations.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d..._Hardware.html