With DirectX 12 Ultimate, Microsoft wants to create a graphics interface that provides Windows and the Xbox Series X with practically identical features. These include ray tracing, variable rate shading (VRS) and mesh shading. This is primarily intended to ensure future security.
Microsoft recently announced DirectX 12 Ultimate in an entry on its developer blog. This is basically a certification that will be found in the future for graphics cards and ensures that all features of the new Xbox Series X are also supported. This should be particularly important because all titles from Microsoft Studios will be launched simultaneously on the console and on the PC.
DirectX 12 Ultimate is more of a further development of the existing DirectX 12 interface, but little changes for consumers. However, with the eye-catching logo on the packaging of graphics cards, it should be much easier to find the models that also support all the features of the next-generation console, so that the games of the next few years should run quite smoothly.
The standard is supported by the graphics cards from both major manufacturers. In this blog entry, AMD explains how GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture form the hardware basis for gaming PCs as well as for both consoles of the next generation, while Nvidia explains in a press release that the in-house RTX graphics cards are the “first” and only “that support the new features of DirectX 12 Ultimate. Embedded below are the demo videos of both companies, which show the advantages of the new technologies.
In a nutshell there is ray tracing for a more realistic calculation of the light of a scene, variable rate shading (VRS) for an improved performance, since different areas of a scene can be rendered in different high quality, mesh shading, which improves the performance with complex geometry and samplers Feedback, a feature that allows information from the previous frame to be recycled to save GPU performance.
source:Microsoft
