14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft officially unveiled DirectX 12 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, promising a significant performance increase as well as several other benefits.
First of all, the new DirectX version will work across the majority of Microsoft platforms, including not only Windows, but also Windows Phone, and Xbox One, the company’s new-generation gaming console debuted a few months ago.
DirectX 12 comes with a new version of Direct3D technology, the graphics API that’s now supposed to be faster and more efficient than previous releases thanks to better usage of modern GPU hardware.
According to Microsoft, the new DirectX 12 boasts a lower level of hardware abstraction, which means that games will benefit from improved multithread scaling and CPU.
“Games will benefit from reduced GPU overhead via features such as descriptor tables and concise pipeline state objects. And that’s not all – Direct3D 12 also introduces a set of new rendering pipeline features that will dramatically improve the efficiency of algorithms such as order-independent transparency, collision detection, and geometry culling,” Microsoft says.
Early benchmarks conducted by the software giant itself are showing that titles using DirectX 12 get a 50 percent improvement in CPU utilization, while the CPU and GPU workload is divided in a much more efficient way in order to improve performance.
Microsoft also revealed that Turn 10 Studios, the company behind Forza Motorsport 5, already tweaked the racing game to use DirectX 12.
“By porting their Xbox One Direct3D 11.X core rendering engine to use Direct3D 12 on PC, Turn 10 was able to bring that console-level efficiency to their PC tech demo,” the company noted.
So how is this possible, you might ask? Microsoft says that it paid particular attention to the API behind the new DirectX version in order to improve and optimize specific areas, including pipeline state representation, work submission, and resource access, all of which have received significant enhancements for increased performance.
“It’s our job to create great APIs and we have worked closely with our hardware and software partners to prove the significant performance wins of Direct3D 12. And these aren’t just micro-benchmarks that we hacked up ourselves – these numbers are for commercially released game engines or benchmarks, running on our alpha implementation,” it says.
Several companies have already announced support for DirectX 12, including NVIDIA (obviously), AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel. NVIDIA also confirmed that future products based on the existing Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell designs, will all come with DirectX 12 support.