Microsoft has also added support for an alternative form of ray tracing called inline ray tracing. 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. 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.
What is directx 12 Pc#
Without getting too bogged down in the technical detail, mesh shaders effectively allow developers to program even more detailed and dynamic environments without making your GPU grind to a halt, while sampler feedback is all to do with shorter load times, less stuttering and higher visual fidelity by letting devs load in textures when they need to rather than all at once.īoth the current crop of Nvidia RTX cards and the upcoming 4K Big Navi GPUs 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 any new PC games just because you haven't upgraded your graphics card in a while.įor those of you who do or are thinking about getting a compatible graphics card, though, here's a brief overview of the improvements. It also adds two new features as well: support for mesh shaders and sampler feedback. Ray tracing (the fancy realistic light and shadow tech so beloved by Nvidia's RTX cards at the moment) and variable rate shading (the ability to simulate certain chunks of the environment that don’t require so much detail as other parts of a scene to help boost performance) were already part of the original DirectX 12 protocol, but DirectX 12 Ultimate improves on these even further, which I'll go into in a minute. In short, DirectX 12 Ultimate should make it a lot easier for developers to implement advanced graphics features in their upcoming games. But what exactly does it do and why should you care? We reveal all below. Dubbed DirectX 12 Ultimate, Microsoft are calling it "the best graphics technology 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.
What is directx 12 software#
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.