Monday 24 March 2014
Microsoft announced that for futuristic gaming to come into action, it was heading DirecX 12 to all of its platforms. Both NVIDIA and AMD are restlessly waiting for the collaboration gold on this release. While AMD plants itself on the Xbox one side, NVIDIA plants itself on the PC side on the map. A number of benefits in the Direct3D 12 universe have been named by the team (NVIDIA and AMD). This release will result in low-overhead API/Runtime which will help you to make use of your GPUs to the maximum. Even though they are concentrating on extending to the Xbox One, Direct3D 12 will work with the existing base of AMD customers as well. AMD says that this feature set and driver model design in Direct3D 12 will leave plenty of headroom for continued innovation.
The usage of DirectX 12, according to Microsoft has halved DirectX 11. The new DirectX12 brings reduced overhead of state changes, reusing of rendered commands quite efficiently, and a more efficient resource binding model.
DirectX 12 while offering benefits for PC and Xbox One, is not ready to ignore mobile devices. Microsoft at their GDC 14 announced that they'd be bringing DirectX to mobile devices as well. And this is great news for mobile devices, which include Windows Phone 8, Windows 8.1 RT, and rest of the mobile devices they release in the near future.
What makes Direct3D 12 better ?
The first benefit that it provides is that it provides a lower level of hardware abstraction than ever before. This allows games to improve CPU utilization and multithreaded scaling. It also provides games with the benefit of reduced GPU overhead via features such as descriptor tables and concise pipeline state objects.
Direct3D 12 also provides a set of new rendering pipelines which improves the efficiency of algorithms such as order independent transparency, geometry culling and collision detection.
NVDIA said that they had worked over the past year with Microsoft to bring DirectX 12 open to the public. NVIDIA also said that they'd be going with DirectX 12 in the future. DirectX 12 provides a promise of rendering features as well as deep-dives into new drives and application models, for the future.
