Windows 10 and DirectX 12 released!
One giant leap for gamers!
It’s been less than 18 months since we announced DirectX 12 at GDC 2014. Since that time, we’ve been working tirelessly with game developers and graphics card vendors to deliver an API that offers more control over graphics hardware than ever before. When we set out to design DirectX 12, game developers gave us a daunting set of requirements:
1) Dramatically reduce CPU overhead while increasing GPU performance
2) Work across the Windows and Xbox One ecosystem
3) Provide support for all of the latest graphics hardware features
Today, we’re excited to announce the fulfillment of these ambitious goals! With the release of Windows 10, DirectX 12 is now available for everyone to use, and the first DirectX 12 content will arrive in the coming weeks. For a personal message from our Vice President of Development, click here.
What will DirectX 12 do for me?
We’re very pleased to see all of the excitement from gamers about DirectX 12! This excitement has led to a steady stream of articles, tweets, and YouTube videos discussing DirectX 12 and what it means to gamers. We’ve seen articles questioning whether DirectX 12 will provide substantial benefits, and we’ve seen articles that promise that with DirectX 12, the 3DFX Voodoo card you have gathering dust in your basement will allow your games to cross the Uncanny Valley.
Let’s set the record straight. We expect that games that use DirectX 12 will:
1) Be able to write to one graphics API for PCs and Xbox One
2) Reduce CPU overhead by up to 50% while scaling across all CPU cores
3) Improve GPU performance by up to 20%
4) Realize more benefits over time as game developers learn how to use the new API more efficiently
To elaborate, DirectX 12 is a paradigm shift for game developers, providing them with a new way to structure graphics workloads. These new techniques can lead to a tremendous increase in expressiveness and optimization opportunities. Typically, when game developers decide to support DirectX 12 in their engine, they will do so in phases. Rather than completely overhauling their engine to take full advantage of every aspect of the API, they will start with their DirectX 11 based engine and then port it over to DirectX 12. We expect such engine developers to achieve up to a 50% CPU reduction while improving GPU performance by up to 20%. The reason we mention “up to” is because every game is different – the more of the various DirectX 12 features (see below) a game uses, the more optimization they can expect.
Over time, we expect that games will build DirectX 12’s capabilities into the design of the game itself, which will lead to even more impressive gains. The game “Ashes of the Singularity” is a good example of a game that bakes DirectX 12’s capabilities into the design itself. The result: a RTS game that can show tens of thousands of actors engaged in dozens of battles simultaneously.
Speaking of games, support for DirectX 12 is currently available to the public in an early experimental mode in Unity 5.2 Beta and in Unreal 4.9 Preview, so the many games powered by these engines will soon run on DirectX 12. In addition to games based on these engines, we’re on pace for the fastest adoption of a new DirectX technology that we’ve had this millennium – so stay tuned for lots of game announcements!
More at the link -
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive ... eased.aspx