11 ms·
DirectX 12
- frik 13y agoForza Motorsport 5 on PC (DX12), that's a good news.
- JetSpiegel 13y agoYeah right. When hell freezes over.
- voltagex_ 13y agoIt's a tech demo only, I'd be very very surprised if we ever see it on PC.
- szatkus 13y agoSeems like a lot of work. They had to port, at least partially, some core engine's capabilities (graphics, physics etc.). They could just enchance some existing PC game or demo. Maybe Forza will be something like launch title for DX12?
- hudo 13y agoHoliday 2015? That's like, 1.5 years from now!? Or 10 internet years!
- bestdayever 13y agoHopefully nobody uses it and opengl becomes the norm.
- KamiCrit 13y agoThat's like forever away! Or two E3s away.
- jagger27 13y agoNow that sounds like an eternity.
- JetSpiegel 13y agoETERNITY! ETERNITY! ETERNITY!
- owenjones 13y agoI am not a graphics / engine programmer but I know a decent amount of what goes into programming a game, and I have to call "suspect" on the claim that low level graphics API programming was heretofore only available on game consoles like the Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Microsoft Xbox One!
- mhurron 13y agoI don't believe they they are saying it was never available but that previous versions of DirectX didn't provide it.
- owenjones 13y agoTrue, but still seems like lying by omission, or at least for PR gain...
- reitzensteinm 13y agoFrom Microsoft's warped perspective, where dogfooding is a religion, it's more or less correct. You've always been able to get a lot more out of consoles considering their specs; the 360 was marginally better than the state of the art of PC hardware, for a few months, but being able to code right to the metal (not as much as on an Amiga or Nintendo, but relative to the PC) gave an efficiency that made the games unmatched for years. AMD's recently released Mantle is the first exception on the PC, and DirectX 12 is reportedly quite similar. Bing it on your Zune for further reading.
- drzaiusapelord 13y agoUnmatched? Compared to what? Those games look like shit compared to a PC that came out on the say day, let alone years later. Not to mention things like limitations of map sizes, player numbers, etc.
- stingraycharles 13y agoYou have to take the hardware specs into account. It's easy to overlook the crappiness of the hardware of those consoles.
- Rickasaurus 13y agoI guess this means that if I want to get the most out of my games I'll have to "upgrade" to Windows 8.1. Not super excited about having to configure away all of the metro garbage.
- dmm 13y agoAsk your favourite developers to use OpenGL instead. Even xp users get the latest version of OpenGL.
- MichaelGG 13y agoOpenGL support seems rather iffy on Windows. Minecraft uses OpenGL and wouldn't run on my i7. At one point it wouldn't even load, but a while later it ran, but at laughable framerates.
- duaneb 13y agoDid you have the drivers installed? Minecraft runs just fine on many, many, many windows i7 machines.
- dmm 13y agoExactly. On windows the OpenGL implementation is supplied by the graphics vender. AMD, Nvidia, or in the case of the i7, intel. Windows comes with an OpenGL implementation but it's an ancient version.
- MichaelGG 13y agoWell before it failed with an error about initializing graphics. When I tried a year later, that error no longer appeared but the FPS was in the single digits. I didn't dig around for special OpenGL drivers, no, I just let Intel and MS push certified drivers out via normal update mechanisms.
- theandrewbailey 13y agoOpenGL has generally been great on Windows, due to the overwhelming demand for high performance graphics on Windows. While i7 GPUs are good in terms of integrated GPUs, they are still not great compared to discrete GPUs (try a GeForce or Radeon).
- hughes 13y agoWhy should I be excited?
- jjcm 13y agoGreater efficiency, more ways for devs to optimize their games. Should see some FPS improvement with dx12.
- bestdayever 13y agoI would prefer they announce they were discontinuing dx and joining the opengl project =\.
- ace22b 13y agoBetter multi core utilization. Less cpu use. Less dependency on single threaded performance.
- danudey 13y ago50% less CPU use for the main thread. Mantle has the same CPU savings, and during discussions on that game developers have talked about how in many (most?) games, up to 50% of your CPU time is spent in the drivers. Considering how many games I've run into lately where single-core performance is the bottleneck, this doesn't surprise me at all. Mantle and DX12 strip out a lot of layers, optimize a lot of what it keeps, and spread a good chunk of the remaining load over multiple threads, meaning that instead of trying to use 120% of core 0 and 15% of cores 1-3, you can use 60% of core 0 and 25% of cores 1-3 (just as a hypothetical made-up example).
- Justsignedup 13y agoI am not excited, as MS's track record shows, any of their "improvements" are not backwards compatible with old OSes. For example IE11 is so awesome! SO AMAZING! Not compatible with Windows XP, yet Chrome and Firefox is still. MS's desire to ship their latest OS has hurt developers over the years. I hope people still chose Open GL over DX-whatever.
- ParkerK 13y ago>Yet Chrome and Firefox are still Older versions of FF are yes, but the latest is not supportedhttps://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works-some-versions-windows-xp https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works... There's no reason they should be expected to put dev resources into an OS that's 12 years old.
- nrc 13y agoTo clarify, current Firefox does support Windows XP, as long as it is up to date, which means service pack 3. If you are still using an _unpatched_ version of Windows XP, well, you're on your own.
- pygy_ 13y ago> There's no reason they should be expected to put dev resources into an OS that's 12 years old. Depending on the the prevalence of XP usage among their users, there might be one, actually.
- Justsignedup 13y agoMy point is speed of abandonment. Yes FF and Chrome gonna drop XP support real soon at EOL of XP. However the creators of XP are not supporting it. That's my point. MS has a history (not even contradicted once yet) of not supporting operating systems that are not the latest and greatest. I bet Win 7 wont be supported by newer IE versions in a year. Which means IE11 may be great, but we're stuck with it forever just like we're stuck with IE8, etc. And if you code for DX12, you will be abandoning like >50% of your audience, so nobody will code for it. Just like DX11 is only now gaining real steam.
- shmerl 13y agoVaporware to scare developers off using Mantle?
- pjmlp 13y agoUntil Mantle is as portable as DirectX in terms of graphics card support, only console developers will care about it. Most of the studios use engines nowadays, so Mantle impact on studios besides AMD blessed ones, remains to be seen.
- shmerl 13y agoMantle isn't yet usable either, but my point is, that DX12 was announced as a vaporware to detract attention from Mantle. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
- higherpurpose 13y agoIt seems SemiAccurate was...accurate - Microsoft just took Mantle and renamed it DX12, to call it their own "innovation": http://semiaccurate.com/2014/03/18/microsoft-adopts-mantle-calls-dx12/ http://semiaccurate.com/2014/03/18/microsoft-adopts-mantle-c...
- pavlov 13y agoIf true, this is a good move by Microsoft. The whole point of this exercise is to be closer to the metal, so why reinvent the wheel. It's something of a Direct3D tradition to design the API around one hardware vendor's state of the art. Direct3D 9 was pretty much based on what the ATI Radeon 9700 could do. At the time this was a serious inconvenience to NVIDIA who had taken a different tack with the Geforce FX (I think it was -- it's been a while).
- wmf 13y agoAnd it's rumored that Mantle is heavily "inspired" by the Xbox One and PS4 APIs. So really MS is copying themselves.
- Jare 13y agoThey are all inspired by the hardware and the experiences implementing high-content game workloads. The main goal is to reduce CPU occupation and improve parallelism of CPU cores. This is achieved in several ways: - reduce raw CPU work by increasing precompilation of state and data to native formats - reduce communication from the CPU to the GPU, by increasing the flexibility of API calls - reduce CPU <-> GPU dependencies by moving some forms of logic and flow into the GPU All of them conspire to increase parallelism as well since there are in general fewer points where synchronization is needed. Playstation developers have a long tradition of doing these things since the first model; Xbox developers not so much, but still a lot more than on PCs. Since the general goal is to reduce API surface, remove abstractions and match the metal more closely, it's natural for APIs to converge.
- Nikker 13y agoOr maybe AMD making an end-run on easy porting from Xbox-PS4-PC(Steam). Thus making their wares more desirable ?
- wtracy 13y agoI somehow cannot access this page with IE 8. WTH, Microsoft?
- joenathan 13y agoYou haven't heard, Microsoft has dropped support for XP.
- wtracy 13y agoI'm on Windows 7, just stuck with IE 8 here at work.
- PopsiclePete 13y agoIE8 is a pre-HTML 5 browser. Glad to see more and more sites are dropping support for it. Install Chrome. You don't even need admin rights. Your IT dept. never has to know.
- Lavinski 13y agoOne API for every device is great for developers targeting the Xbox and other windows devices.
- TillE 13y agoIt makes the job of engine developers somewhat easier in the long run, but very few game developers are writing raw DirectX these days. And (almost) nobody's targeting just Microsoft devices, even developers who are paid for temporary exclusives. It's all about the cross-platform engines.
- conkrete 13y agoClosed source API's like DirectX won't ever be as fast as an open source API standard like OpenGL. This is why games like Left-4-Dead2 using OpenGL run substantially faster (More FPS) (http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-fas...)
- Lavinski 13y agoOpenGL is not actually open source. https://www.opengl.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_OpenGL_Open_Source.3F https://www.opengl.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_OpenGL_Open_Source.3F
- NamTaf 13y agoYour first assertion has no bearing in reality. There's nothing prohibiting a closed-source API form being as fast as or faster than an open-source one. Your second assertion does not imply that your first is correct. It may be that the current example of open-source are faster than the current example of closed-source, and there may be very real advantages that the open-source approach brings about that pushes the status quo towards as you describe, but there's nothing mandating that. I'm not sure why you'd therefore assert that.
- conkrete 13y agoI certainly stand corrected, I made the assumption that OpenGL was open source (which was incorrect) The assertion I was intending to make was that widely used open source applications tend to be analyzed and improved by a larger community and thus are more likely to be more steamlined/efficient ("faster" was also not a correct term here to describe efficient pipelines) Although as someone stated further down, OpenGL is not actually open source, it's an open standard. So my original point is null and void as is. I believe my hate for Microsoft had blinded me, forgive me.
- jwr 13y agoNo, I am not excited. I expect this will be (again) used as an excuse to force me to upgrade either Windows, my video card, or both.
- ksk 13y agoSo don't upgrade? How are you being forced?
- pjc50 13y agoInevitably a game will come out that is DX12-only, at which point you have to incur those costs if you want to play it.
- ksk 13y agoSure, and that would suck. There isn't any aspect of force that I can make out. I'm seeing it as 'minimum system requirements will change and I don't want them to.' We've seen studios release DX11/Vista+ games with fallbacks to work on DX10/XP.