AMD and Nvidia prep for next-gen DirectX 12

Several new sets of slides from AMD and Nvidia as well surfaced on the webs through slideshare, the decks show what the companies have been up to in regards to DirectX 12, and they do look pretty excited. Especially AMD has something to gain, bigtime.

The guys over at Wccftech spotted the decks, so props to them first. As you know MS is to release DX12 alongside Windows 10. We can all discuss how much of a shame it is to not release DX12 to Windows 7 users, but .. well that's shameful corporate greediness I am afraid. DirectX 12, both Nvidia and AMD are prepping for it in both software at driver level and of course hardware APUs and graphics cards).

For AMD starting at Radeon HD 7000 and above the API is supported. For Nvidia that would be everything Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell, yes that is GeForce series 400 and above.

Key features of DirectX 12 will be:

• Better use of multi-core CPUs
• More on-screen detail
• Higher min/max/average framerates
• Smoother gameplay
• More efficient use of GPU hardware
• Reduced System power draw
• Allows for new game designs previously considered impossible due to restriction by older APIs

More efficient usage of CPUs with multiple cores is trivial in the design. At this very moment with DirectX 11, no matter how many cores your CPU has, the first core does the majority of the hard work for the API, the rest of the cores doing very little. With DirectX 12, the data-sets and this load will be better distributed and utilized meaning a far more efficint design usage, which removed certain CPU bottlenecks. DX12 is said to be capable of using as many as eight cores and hey, AMD has very nicely priced 8-core processors. So DX12 might be a very interesting development fpr AMD alright as it will not only boost GPU sales, but their CPUs are better utilized. For Nvidia the gain is to be found in that better CPU utilization, but also new multi-sampling shaders, vastly faster geometry shader rendering and ray tracing shadows. DirectX 12 will make better use of the GPU resources available to it, which will benefit system with beefier graphics cards. 

Anyhow have a peek at the many slides. We think DX12 will be very relevant, but you will need some actual properly programmed games for it as well. Have a peek at the slides, good stuff.