Nvidia wastes no time highlighting this in its own blog on DX12 Ultimate.

If any of the above sounds familiar, it’s because they were all introduced at the hardware level to the PC ecosystem in 2018 by – you guessed it – Nvidia’s RTX cards and its Turing architecture (Sampler Feedback is enabled by Texture Space Shading). Microsoft has a lot more detail on all four features in its announcement blog.

Sampler Feedback: Querying texture samplers to more intelligently pick which part of a texture to load into memory and thus more efficiently use available VRAM.ĭirectX already supports DXR (version 1.0) and VRS, but DirectX 12 Ultimate will enhance both of these while adding Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback for the first time.

Mesh Shaders: Harnessing GPU compute power to make the geometry pipeline more efficient and flexible, dramatically raising the number of objects that can be in a scene without crippling the CPU.

Variable Rate Shading: The ability to vary the rate of shading in a scene to improve or degrade visual quality depending on the level of detail required.DirectX Raytracing 1.1: An update to the most well-known feature of DX12 that adds new capabilities including inline ray tracing, giving developers more control over the ray tracing process.‘ This mark of quality ensures stellar “future-proof” feature support for next generation games!’ writes Microsoft. The logo, seen above, will be slapped onto the packaging and marketing materials for PC graphics hardware to indicate feature parity with the Xbox Series X, which is confirmed as having full hardware-level support for all the new features. Traditionally, DirectX 12 Ultimate would have been called DirectX feature level 12_2, but as a key player in both PC and console gaming, Microsoft has been working to unify the Windows 10 and Xbox ecosystems over the years, and DX12 Ultimate is its next step. With its next-gen console hardware specifications now a known entity, Microsoft has announced DirectX 12 Ultimate, an update to its API that includes four key rendering features, all of which the Xbox Series X will fully support.ĭirectX feature updates are Microsoft’s way of bundling the latest advances in GPU technology into a single package, primarily to make the lives of game developers easy and create a baseline for future games to work from.

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