DirectX 12 is Official, Announced at GDC 2014

Earlier today Microsoft announced at the Game Developer’s Conference the release of the newest version of the currently most used API, DirectX 12.

DirectX’s development manager Anuj Gosalia announced to a crowd of over 300 developers that this new API is a team effort featuring a greater deal of input not just from their own team and hardware developers, but game developers as well.

In previous version’s DirectX has been designed with little control and input from application developers due to wanting to make it stable and avoid any kind of mishaps, but as a result developers haven’t been able to always allow an API to take full advantage of a GPU or CPU’s resources. The hope for DX12 is that applications will now have full access and direct control over managing hardware resources, having a better idea of what a program needs to run at maximum efficiency, and making full use of multi-core based systems.

We have reaped much of what can be gained from pixels. DX12’s focus is on enabling a dramatic increase in visual richness through a significant decrease in API-related CPU overhead. Historically, drivers and OS software have managed memory, state, and synchronization on behalf of developers. However, inefficiencies result from the imperfect understanding of an application’s needs. DX12 gives the application the ability to directly manage resources and state, and perform necessary synchronization. As a result, developers of advanced applications can efficiently control the GPU, taking advantage of their intimate knowledge of the game’s behavior.

This is all very much still a work in progress, and what has been seen today is just the basic outline and model of what DX12 will be, with future press releases focusing on new rendering features. Nvidia has stated that all DX11 based GPU’s will be compatible with DX12, which covers the majority of currently available cards.

Source: NVIDIA