14 DAY TRIAL // The team at Microsoft in charge of gaming has used the Game Developers Conference event in San Francisco to announce that it is working on DirectX 12, which is set to significantly improve gaming experiences on a range of devices and will be delivered before the holiday launch season of 2015.
The company explains in an official blog post that the most important element of the coming release is Direct3D 12, which will run on everything from tablets to PCs and the recently launched Xbox One home console.
The new tech is designed to provide “a lower level of hardware abstraction than ever before, allowing games to significantly improve multithread scaling and CPU utilization. In addition, games will benefit from reduced GPU overhead via features such as descriptor tables and concise pipeline state objects.”
Direct3D 12 is also adding new rendering pipeline features that will improve the overall performance of most video games.
A lot more technical details are offered on the official Microsoft site, and the company claims that it will share even more on DirectX 12 at a later date, including info on how other elements of the software will be improved.
During the GDC event the team also showed off a demo of Forza Motorsport 5 running using DirectX 12 on a powerful PC, saying that it will deliver almost photorealistic image quality.
Microsoft adds, “Forza achieves this by using the efficient low-level APIs already available on Xbox One today. Traditionally this level of efficiency was only available on console – now, Direct3D 12, even in an alpha state, brings this efficiency to PC and Phone as well.”
The development team at Turn 10 ported their Xbox One-based Direct3D 11.X engine to DirectX 12 on the PC to create the demo, but there are currently no plans to actually create a PC version of the racing experience.
Microsoft says that more than 80 percent of the gaming PCs that are currently being sold include the hardware that is required to use the new tech when it is launched, before the holiday period of 2015.
The company is also working with a wide array of partners to create more devices compatible with DirectX 12, and announcements about them will be made in the coming months.
It will be interesting to see how the Xbox One benefits form the addition of DirectX 12 and how the various development teams working on the next-gen console will use its new features.