Today, as a part of Microsoft’s Developer Day, the company has announced its collaboration with Nvidia on the newest graphics API in the DirectX family, DirectX 12 Ultimate. DirectX 12 Ultimate will feature improvements in the way that modern graphical workloads are handled and developed, including integration with current game-development techniques such as variable rate shading (VRS) and sampler feedback for texture streaming into the DirectX 12 development package, while also making use of new tools like mesh shaders.
A big addition will be the introduction of new ray-tracing development tools, called DXR 1.1. DXR 1.1 represents an incremental improvement over the original DXR 1.0 toolset. The techniques it uses were co-developed alongside Microsoft using elements of the Minecraft engine to help inform development. It works by, once again, giving developers a greater level of control over their own tools, and in the case of ray tracing, allowing developers to choose how the engine itself actually functions.
The DXR Deets
In DXR 1.0, a flat set of math was applied to scenes that used real-time ray-traced light. Now, in DXR 1.1, using a process known as “inline ray tracing,” developers can independently control various aspects of how the light engine behaves that weren’t possible to tinker with before.
Next, there’s a new texture toolset with DirectX Sampler Feedback. This should help developers of large, open-world games the most. In those titles, the higher the resolution of a texture, the more room it takes up in the graphical pipeline. That pipeline can easily get clogged when hundreds, or even thousands, of various onscreen elements are all vying for that same space.
The improved texture-streaming techniques within Sampler Feedback greatly increase the efficiency of how textures are handled by your hardware. In theory, this should give devs the opportunity to create more detailed worlds than ever.
Another Fine Mesh
Finally, there’s the introduction of mesh shaders. Mesh shaders are a new technique that developers can use to help simplify the geometry pipeline, which used to encompass dozens of different shader types and stages that now all fall within a single category.
The technical details of how employing mesh shaders is a better alternative than preceding technologies are incredibly dense. (If you are so inclined, you can check them out for yourself on Microsoft’s developer blog here.) The main takeaway: Developers will have a lot more freedom and technical resources to create virtual worlds in ways that they weren’t afforded until now.
Microsoft has announced that DirectX 12 Ultimate and DXR 1.1 will both be made available for all developers today. In the meantime, Nvidia has also issued the following explainer video with more details.
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