The first version of DirectX released for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 was version 2.0a, in June 1996. Microsoft quickly realized that in order for the Windows operating system to become popular with gamers, it had to give game developers a way for their products to access the same hardware resources in Windows, as in DOS.
It was easy for new PC owners to quickly become frustrated trying to get games to run because of all the hurdles they had to jump through. This then allowed you to give games access to larger amounts memory, the sound card, the mouse, etc. In order to give games direct access to system hardware, you first had to boot into DOS and use special arguments in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Chief among these are games for which without DirectX, the Windows platform simply would not dominate in gaming as it does.įor a great while, at least in the years prior to Windows 95 Service Release 2, gaming on a PC was often a torturous ordeal involving DOS and boot disks.
Gamers will immediately know what this is but they may not perhaps realize just how important an update it will be.ĭirectX is the name Microsoft uses to describe a whole slew of application programming interfaces (API) it uses for multimedia and video applications.
In a blog post, it states that it’s been working with Microsoft on DirectX 12 for over four years, and, for what it’s worth, it’s really excited at the prospect that every GeForce user equipped with Fermi or later will be able to take advantage of DX12.When Microsoft began detailing new features of its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, one of those features it talked about is DirectX 12. It sounds more like DirectX 11.5.įor some reason, Forza 5 was ported to the PC for a D3D12 demo.Īs far as vendor support goes, NVIDIA’s quite excited about it. The fact that all (or most) DirectX 11-capable cards can likewise handle DirectX 12 makes me question whether or not this is in fact a major release at all. It’ll certainly be nice when it gets here, but to me it feels more like an evolution than a revolution – one that should have happened long ago. I’m just having a hard time getting that excited about a technology that AMD announced last fall. I admit I am underselling what we know about DirectX 12 at this point. Remember when tessellation seemed like the coolest feature ever? Even DirectCompute has good value. Normally, when a new Direct3D API is announced, it’s something high-end gamers can get excited about – but not here. As we’ve seen from AMD’s Mantle, higher-end setups stand to gain very, very little on the flip-side, those running more modest setups could experience some noticeable gains.
Still, is that enough to get me excited? Not really. Really – no one ever complains about extra performance, and given this type of approach seems to have no downside, I say “Bring it on!”įuturemark’s 3DMark 11 running with DirectX 12 This kind of gain could be especially important if we consider that future games will be more demanding than ever, and perhaps even stress a mainstream GPU to its limit quite easily. I’m not sure about everyone else, but I expected to hear about the graphical features that would be made possible with Direct3D 12 instead, the bulk of what we learned about is what’s in effect an AMD Mantle clone: A console-like low-level API.Ī “bare to the metal” graphics API is important it could vastly improve the efficiency of our GPUs, which could result in higher framerates in our games. At this point, I’d say the answer is “Sure.” Now, the question has to be asked, “Is it worth getting excited over?”.
At this week’s Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco, Microsoft took the veil off its long-awaited DirectX 12 graphics library.