Microsoft presents the DirectX 12 Ultimate API, top graphics for PC and Xbox Series X

On the occasion of the DirectX Developer Day held yesterday in streaming on Mixer, Microsoft has announced the DirectX 12 Ultimate API, an improved version of the now mature DX12 libraries that will bring interesting developments both in PC gaming and console.

In addition to new technologies and programming tools that we will talk about shortly, it should be emphasized that DirectX 12 Ultimate are born mainly with the aim of definitively unifying the PC and Xbox platforms, trying in this way to favor the task of the developers as much as possible.

Among the main features of DirectX 12 Ultimate there is certainly the full support for ray-tracing technology, especially at DirectX Raytracing 1.1 (DXR 1.1) – an evolution of the DXR 1.0 introduced by Microsoft in 2018 – but that's not all, DirectX 12 Ultimate adds new features like Variable Rate Shading, Mesh shader is Sampler Feedback.

Variable Rate Shading it is certainly one of the most interesting techniques since it should significantly optimize the GPU performance, allowing substantially to focus the graphics chip's computing power on certain areas of the game scene (the most important ones), rendering the rest of the image with a quality slightly lower, all in favor of a smoother framerate and definitely more optimized load on the graphics card.

Mesh shader instead, it is a feature already introduced by NVIDIA on Turing GPUs and essentially allows you to create and manage more complex scenes, while trying to avoid the so-called "bottlenecks". Sampler Feedback it moves in a similar direction in terms of optimizations and basically allows you to use memory more efficiently, probably with a positive impact when it comes to high resolutions (beyond QHD).

Needless to say, there are currently no titles that can take full advantage of DirectX 12 Ultimate, but following you can see an example of what we can see in the two demos released respectively by NVIDIA and AMD:

DirectX 12 Ultimate are compatible with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards and upcoming AMD Radeons with RDNA2 architecture. Microsoft will release the new APIs with the Windows 10 20H1 update which at the moment, however, does not have a precise launch date.