Items tagged with DX12
Microsoft has some good news for game developers, and especially those who are taking advantage of its DirectX 12 API. The Redmond outfit announced that PIX, its premier performance tuning and debugging tool for Xbox, is now available for free on Windows 10. The standalone tool for Windows 10 is built on the Xbox version, so developers targeting both platforms can get started optimizing their Windows titles, too. "It has become increasingly clear that, with low-level APIs such as DirectX 12, attaining the best performance requires deep insight into every step of the rendering process. On Xbox, we have a long running history of providing some of the most in-depth graphics analysis tools in the...
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There's been a lot of chatter about DirectX 12, the low-level graphics API built into Windows 10, and what effect it will have on PC gaming. Developers will more fully embrace DX12 as time goes on, but in the meantime, is your rig up to snuff? Futuremark will help you answer that question with Time Spy, a new DX12 benchmark test it added to 3DMark, which is now available on Steam. Source: Futuremark The new Time Spy test processes more objects, textures, and effects than any of 3DMark's other benchmarking tests, and by a large degree. That's because DX12 supports a host of new API features, things such as asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading. Time Spy sports a pure...
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Futuremark is working on an update to its popular 3DMark benchmarking suite that will test the DirectX 12 capabilities of your gaming system. Called Time Spy, the new benchmark sports a "pure DirectX 12 engine" that was built from scratch to support the new features of DX12, including asynchronous compute, explicit mulit-adapater, and of course multi-threading. In anticipation of the new benchmark, Futuremark released a teaser trailer that's just over a minute long. Futuremark says it provides a "glimpse of gaming's future while revisiting classic 3DMark scenes from the past" and challenges viewers to see how many of them they can spot. There's been a lot of hype surrounding the DX12, an...
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Do you think Microsoft might be a little stoked about DirectX 12? You better believe it. Microsoft's excitement over its next-generation API spilled over into a short video demo comparing the visual effects of DX12 to that of DX11, while also explaining some of the benefits, like reduced latency and smoother frame rates. "DirectX 12 is a ground-breaking Microsoft technology that gives game developers the ability to harness the full capabilities of a PC’s GPU(s) and raise the bar on graphic fidelity and immersive gameplay," Microsoft explains in the video's description. The neat thing about DX12 is that it's a low level API, like Vulkan. What that means is that developers have deeper access to...
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Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the past several years and are starting to blur the line between animation and real actors. One of the more difficult tasks for CG artists is to recreate human emotions, especially crying, though you wouldn't know it after watching a tech demo that Square Enix showed off at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference. The real-time tech demo is called Witch Chapter 0 [cry] and is part of a research project that studies various next generation technologies. For this particular demo, Square Enix put a lot of research into real-time CG technology utilizing DirectX 12 in collaboration with Microsoft and NVIDIA, the company said. It's an ongoing project...
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It looks like Microsoft is really hoping to entice people over to Windows 10 considering that Windows 8 has failed to take off. With its latest announcement that DirectX 12 will be included with Windows 10, Microsoft is targeting game developers and gamers. On its DirectX developer blog, Microsoft revealed additional incentives for game developers who would join its Windows Insider program. Those who sign up and are accepted, will receive everything they might need to help jumpstart their DirectX 12 development. This includes updated runtime, API headers, samples, drivers, and documentations. Microsoft also revealed that it has worked with Epic Games so that Unreal Engine 4.4 will support DX12....
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One of the hot topics in the wake of Titanfall's launch has been whether or not DirectX 12 would make a difference to the game's sometimes jerky framerate and lower-than-expected 792p resolution. According to Titanfall developer Jon Shirling, the new Microsoft API isn't needed to improve the game's performance, and updates coming down the pipe should improve Xbox One play in the near future. This confirms what we've expected since DX12 was announced -- the API may offer performance improvements in certain scenarios, but DX12 isn't a panacea for the Xbox One's lackluster performance compared to the PS4. It's an API that appears to mostly address scenarios where the CPU isn't able to keep the GPU...
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At GDC a few weeks ago, NVIDIA teased a new set of drivers that it promised would offer huge scaling benefits for both single-GPU and SLI configurations. The new driver, 337.50 Beta, drops today -- so what kind of gains can users expect? If you own a high-end NVIDIA card, apparently quite a bit, especially if you game with multiple GPUs in SLI. NVIDIA is predicting some huge jumps for its high-end range with scaling up 50-70% in some cases. These are an impressive set of gains for NVIDIA's top-end cards, particularly the GTX 770, which remains rather more affordable than the top-end GTX 780 Ti. NVIDIA's own slide deck claims "up to 64% faster single GPU performance," but none of the slides the...
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One of the most anticipated announcements of GDC this year has been Microsoft's unveiling of DirectX 12. The event today was light on some details, but didn't disappoint -- DirectX 12 looks like a huge step forward for gaming. The problem DX12 wants to solve is the same issue that drove Mantle. DirectX 11 isn't very good at allocating resources efficiently, the API's performance is often choked by single-threaded CPU performance. GPUs are already far faster than CPUs (as shown below), so limiting the graphics card's performance by choking it with a single-threaded CPU is a major problem. What's New In DX12 Microsoft and Nvidia have both posted blog posts talking about the new features of the...
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