DX 12 officially unveiled and the first details

Chickenprotector · August 11, 2020, 10:52am

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/direct-x-12-officially-unveiled-first-details-inside/

During this year’s GDC, Microsoft has unveiled its latest DirectX API, DX12. DX12 will be a faster API than its predecessors, and will let developers create more complex scenes. This new API will work across all Microsoft platforms, and will be supported by excellent tools.

DX12 will come with new rendering features, a lower level of abstraction than ever before, resource management improvements and will address state and rendering overhead.

The first application that will take advantage of DX12 will be Futuremark’s 3DMark.

As Microsoft noted, the CPU performance has not improved at the same rate during these past years compared to the GPU performance. This difference rate of increase is a big challenge for the DX API, which is why MS is bringing this new API.

DX12 will be better optimized for multi-CPUs. As we all knew, in DX11 one core was doing most of the work. In DX12, however, the overall CPU utilization will be down 50% and the workload will be more spread out.

What’s also interesting here is that according to AMD’s slide, existing customers will benefit from this new API from the get-go. This may mean that DX12 will be backwards compatible with DX11.1 GPUs. Nvidia has also announced that it will support DX12 on Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell and forward.

The first DX12 games will be coming in late 2015. A preview release of DX12 will out later this year, and there will be an Early Access program for this new API.

Enjoy and stay tuned for more. Also kudos to PCPer for its live blogging!

It said they’re available on all platforms. Is it just me or is that going to be bullshit for their older operating systems?

Kairouseki · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

I think they said at the end that they don’t have anything to announce about Windows 7 support but they’re keeping it in mind. It’ll probably not work on Win7 though. I doubt anyone besides Microsoft’s studios will be making DX12 games for quite a while after it’s released anyway.

JohnWorfin · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

Devs have to stick to DX9 because so many folks are sticking to XP. Microsoft bundling their latest closed API to their latest closed windblows version prevents widespread adoption. It is one of the reasons that valve is investing so heavily in openGL

geekofalltrades · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

Screw DirectX, OpenGL is the way of the future.

Mr_GameCrazy · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

What about Mantle?

Anyway, I think DX 12 sounds really good.

elevenbravo · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

i love technology :3

Kairouseki · August 11, 2020, 10:52am

Mantle’s only feature can easily be implemented into either of the existing APIs, as shown by DX12 doing something similar. There’s really no reason for it to exist but I hope it encourages OpenGL to work on stuff too. I suppose having 3 APIs isn’t all that bad though. Is Mantle cross platform like OpenGL, or open source? I’d honestly prefer DX to die and Mantle and OpenGL compete with each other.

Edit: Looks like it’s already happening

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/20/opengl-gdc2014/

bur · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

great, another marketing trick to funnel people to new and amazing(ly poorly designed) software

Chickenprotector · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

No shit. It’s microshaft we’re talking about. lol I really am tempted to do a dual boot mockup for my next system in a couple of years with Linux as my main.

Dragunov2 · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

It’s a good but late move!

Sure they are back in business

But only after AMD already has Mantle

Diabolical · August 11, 2020, 10:52am

DirectX 12 Requires New Graphics Cards to Utilize All Features:
https://www.hardware-360.com/directx-12-requires-new-graphics-cards-to-utilize-all-features/

FERGUS · November 25, 2018, 4:00am

Well, duh. You can’t add new things without the hardware to support it.