Again looking towards improvements on the image quality front, DirectX 10.1 will also see the introduction of full application control over anti-aliasing. This will allow applications to control the usage of both multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing, as well as giving them the ability to choose sample patterns to best suit the rendering scenario in a particular scene or title. Finally, these changes in DirectX 10.1 give the application control over the pixel coverage mask, a mask which is used to help to quickly approximate sampling for an area of pixels. This in particular should prove to be a boon when anti-aliasing particles, vegetation, scenes with motion blur and the like. All of this additional control handed to the application could allow for anti-aliasing to be used much more wisely and effectively, and controlled by game developers themselves, rather than the current 'all or nothing' implementation available, which basically amounts to a simple on-off switch.
To add further to the additional focus on anti-aliasing in DirectX 10.1, support for a minimum of four samples per pixel (in other words, 4x anti-aliasing) is now required (Although this doesn't necessarily mean that support for 2x anti-aliasing in hardware and drivers is a thing of the past).