Microsoft announces DirectX 12 at GDC 2014, will span across PC, Xbox One, tablets and smartphones

At its annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) held in San Francisco, Microsoft has unveiled DirectX 12, the latest version of the graphics API after DirectX 11. Speaking to a crowd of about 500 developers, Anuj Gosalia, development manager of DirectX at Microsoft, described DX12 as the joint effort of hardware vendors, game developers and his team.

Gosalia showcased the new API with a tech demo of the Xbox One racing game Forza running on a PC powered by an NVIDIA GeForce Titan Black. The software team has also provided a driver to game studios to facilitate further design feedback as well as actual game development. “Our work with Microsoft on DirectX 12 began more than four years ago with discussions about reducing resource overhead. For the past year, NVIDIA has been working closely with the DirectX team to deliver a working design and implementation of DX12 at GDC,” he said.

In the past, getting developers to adopt new APIs was a challenge since the size of the available market where the APIs would be put to use was too small. Adopting specific features in new APIs has always been muted due to the lack of support in the substantial console market, as well as absence of feature deployment on popular versions of the Windows OS. All this chnages with DX 12 though as the new API will span across PCs, XBox One, tablets and even phones.

Nvidia will also match Microsoft OS support for DX12. Nvidia will support the DX12 API on all the DX11-class GPUs it has shipped thus far which includes Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell architectural families.

GPUs have continued to rapidly increase in performance, while single-core CPU performance has been gated by power limits. Multi-core CPUs have provided some advancement but still trail GPUs in peak performance. In parallel, applications have embraced task-parallelism, adopting sophisticated scheduling systems to scale performance with the number of CPU cores. This has in turn driven the need for an API that scales similarly with core count. GPU performance can be exploited three ways: drawing better pixels, more pixels and more objects. 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.

While the debut focused on the form of the graphics API, future Direct3D releases will include new rendering features along with a new driver/application, said the company.