DX12 Details: What to Expect from the Next Generation of DirectX

[Kutt]

I read that DirectX 12 will be featured in the future generation of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia in circa 2014.

Are there any details yet about what might be included in the next version of DirectX? DX10 was a huge leap from DX9, while DX11 was essentially DX10 with bug fixes, better coding, and tesselation.

Hopefully DX12 will deliver something that will awe us PC gamers much like Crysis did with DX10. Do I smell a CryEngine 4?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Yeah early 2014 is the best guess for now. A mature DX11 game is looking pretty nice right now. DX12 will surely be a wonder. We're looking at least 4 years before a mature DX12 game is released though. I can't really find any specs or details. Once Windows 8 is released perhaps more will be known.

 

[Kutt]

Yeah early 2014 is the best guess for now. A mature DX11 game is looking pretty nice right now. DX12 will surely be a wonder. We're looking at least 4 years before a mature DX12 game is released though. I can't really find any specs or details. Once Windows 8 is released perhaps more will be known.

Along with the 22nm HD 8xxx and GTX 7xx series graphics cards from AMD/Nvidia.

 

[wuliheron]

With the addition of direct compute Dx 11 is a mature rasterized graphics API and even developers are wondering what other major features could be added. Things like tessellation are not fundamentally new features, but refinements of old ones. As disappointing as it might be all of the trends in the industry right now are towards improving portables rather than high end gaming rigs and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that's the biggest benefits that dx 12 brings to the table.

However, in the next few years you can expect computer architectures to change radically and when that happens all bets are off. Intel's new Haswell has a ton of ram added right on the chip using a transposer to double it's graphics punch while using only 10w and they've been suggesting that as a result system ram may become history. We'll just have to wait and see what happens when the dust settles, but it's pretty safe to say computers will never be the same again. The ability to add ridiculous amounts of even nonvolatile memory right onto the chips themselves with transfer speeds up to 1Tb/s is a game changer.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

However, in the next few years you can expect computer architectures to change radically and when that happens all bets are off. Intel's new Haswell has a ton of ram added right on the chip using a transposer to double it's graphics punch while using only 10w and they've been suggesting that as a result system ram may become history. We'll just have to wait and see what happens when the dust settles, but it's pretty safe to say computers will never be the same again. The ability to add ridiculous amounts of even nonvolatile memory right onto the chips themselves with transfer speeds up to 1Tb/s is a game changer.

You should write a blog. I'd be very interested in reading! :)

I think you're right. Graphics will slow for ultra rigs and focus on mobility.

 

[wuliheron]

You should write a blog. I'd be very interested in reading! :)

I think you're right. Graphics will slow for ultra rigs and focus on mobility.

I know nothing about blogging and I'm not sure there's all that much more to say. For ten years now the industry has been struggling to recover from being forced to switch to multicore processing. It has been the quiet before the storm and will last at least another two years. Sure, there are efforts to produce a 100ghz graphene chip within five years and IBM's neuromorphic chip within ten, but when those might reach the commercial market is anyone's guess. For now we're just going to have to wait and see what radically new computer architecture Intel comes up with and about we can say for sure is it will make all our current benchmarks obsolete.