At the GDC 2015, Microsoft fully unveiled a tech demo and detailed information of their new API, the DirectX 12. This new API is purely ready for when Windows 10 that is has also been announced by Microsoft too! From what they’ve shown so far, DirectX 12 looks like a massive step forward in gaming!
The unveiling of the new DirectX demos at GDC were very impressive, where it showcased the incredible differences between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. Some of the benchmarks show more than a 100% increase in frame rate!
While these benchmarks have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as they are produced by Microsoft to showcase DirectX 12. If half of the performance gains are true, this new API will be an amazing thing for gaming.
Features And Improvements Of DirectX 12
The incredible performance increases in DirectX 12 are made possible through similar improvements in hardware access levels that Mantle has already implemented, as well as through other improvements to render time and better support for multi-GPU setups. One of the most interesting new features of DirectX 12 is that it will have the ability to utilize multiple GPU’s in a system as one gigantic GPU, rather than what AMD’s Crossfire and Nvidia’s SLI interfaces do now. This will lead to the RAM on GPUs (as well as the GPUs itself) so that each GPU is used fully. This could means GPUs such as the Radeon R9 295 X2 or the Nvidia Titan Z having true 8 and 12 gb frame buffers, respectively.
With these improvements, this means that video games will be much easier to run, and also look much better, with significantly more AI and other elements present in-game. This could lead to games that will be very well optimized and look drop-dead amazing, like Crysis 2 did when it came out with its DirectX 11 version.
Games Are Already In Development For DirectX 12
One last particularly interesting thing to note is that Microsoft has revealed that over 400 game developers are already working with DirectX 12. This translates to somewhere around 100 game studios already working on making games that use DirectX 12, which could mean that we may see full production DirectX 12 games out by the end of 2015.
One example is Cryengine’s trailer where the game will be a DirectX 12 game.
