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What the heck is DirectX 12 Ultimate and what does it mean for PC gaming?X marks the spot, I tell ya
X marks the spot, I tell ya
Microsoft announced a new version of DirectX 12 yesterday, which is the bit of tech that allows games and other types of software to work with your PC’s audio and video hardware. Dubbed DirectX 12 Ultimate, Microsoft are calling it “the best graphics technology [they’ve] ever introduced” and have declared it “future-proof” for next generation games thanks to its built-in support for ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shaders and other techy bits. But what exactly does it do and why should you care? We reveal all below.
Both the current crop of Nvidia RTX cards and the upcoming 4KBig NaviGPUs have been confirmed to support DirectX 12 Ultimate, but the good news is that games that end up making use of certain Ultimate features will still be compatible with older hardware, so you don’t need to worry about being locked out of anynew PC gamesjust because you haven’t upgraded your graphics card in a while.
For those of you who do or are thinking about getting a compatible graphics card, though, here’s a brief overview of the improvements. Starting with ray tracing, also known as DirectX Ray tracing 1.1, these processes have all been streamlined and made more efficient, which will hopefully result in smaller performance dips when you switch it on in-game. AMD have also been working closely with Microsoft on the design of this update, and they’ve since showed off their very first ray tracing demo to show it off. Have a watch below. It’s chrome-o-matic.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Microsoft has also added support for an alternative form of ray tracing called inline ray tracing. This looks to be a slightly simpler form of the realistic light and shadow tech, or at least a simpler way of implementing it in real-time, giving developers another option of working it into their game. It can also be combined with the more traditional “dynamic” shader-based ray tracing to help manage the workload more efficiently. If you want to read more about it, you can peruseMicrosoft’s dev blogon the subject.
Microsoft didn’t go into too much detail on how they’ve improved their variable rate shading tech, all told, but it’s the addition of mesh shader support that’s a lot more interesting. Nvidia have a really good demo explaining what this is and what it means for games, which you can watch below. In short, it allows your GPU to render considerably more complex shapes and geometries on the fly without causing your GPU to buckle under the load. As for the long version, well, have a read of that there dev blog again, because it gets very technical very quickly.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
