DIRECTX 12 FEATURE LEVEL 11 PC
The long lifecycle of consoles means that by mid-generation they’re outpaced by PC GPUs in teams of features, and while the two products are not perfect substitutes for each other in an economic sense, it becomes one less thing that game consoles have going for themselves, and one more advantage for the PC.
DIRECTX 12 FEATURE LEVEL 11 SERIES
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this also lets Microsoft talk up the Xbox Series X as being on the same level as (current) PC GPUs. So similar to the current-generation consoles being the true kick-off point for DirectX 11 becoming the baseline for video game development, Microsoft is aiming to do the same for the next-gen consoles and DirectX 12 and they’re trying to do it in a more organized fashion than ever before. While Microsoft has always attempted to take advantage of the synergy between PC and console, the fact that DirectX 12 was finalized after the Xbox One family launch meant that the past generation has been somewhat misaligned. Second, this is the first console launch for Microsoft where DirectX 12 has been ready and available at launch. The end result of that process is the new feature level 12_2, or as it’s being branded, DirectX 12 Ultimate. So DirectX has been overdue to package up features introduced by things like NVIDIA’s Turing GPU architecture as well as AMD’s forthcoming RDNA2 architecture. First, DirectX has accumulated a lot of new features since its last feature set, feature level 12_1, was defined over half a decade ago. Most of these features have been available in some form for a time now as separate features within DirectX 12, but the creation of DirectX 12 Ultimate marks their official promotion from in-development or early adaptor status to being ready for the masses at large.įor Microsoft, the importance of DirectX 12 Ultimate is twofold.
This includes DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback. To be sure, what’s being announced today isn’t a new API – even the features being discussed today technically aren’t new – but rather it’s a newly defined feature set that wraps up several features that Microsoft and its partners have been working on over the past few years. And, of course, this allows Microsoft to maximize the synergy between PC gaming and their forthcoming console, giving developers a single feature set to base their projects around while promoting the fact that the latest Xbox will support the very latest GPU features. This includes not only wrapping up features like ray tracing and variable rate shading into a single package, but then branding that package so that developers and the public at large can more easily infer whether games are using these cutting-edge features, and whether their hardware supports it. Designed as a new, standardized DirectX 12 feature set that encapsulates the latest in GPU technology, DirectX 12 Ultimate is intended to serve as a common baseline for both PC game development and Xbox Series X development. Leading the PC pack this week is Microsoft (again), with the announcement of DirectX 12 Ultimate. Not to be left out of the fray, there is PC-related news coming out of the show as well. As the saying goes, the show must go on, and this week we’ve seen Microsoft, Sony, and others go ahead and make some big announcements about their gaming consoles and other projects. While the 2020 Game Developers Conference has been postponed, that thankfully doesn’t mean everything gaming-related for this spring has been postponed as well.