Microsoft Confirms DirectX 12 Is Alive and Well, Demo Coming At GDC

MojoKid writes "Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that the company is putting a full court press behind DirectX 12. The company responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it has been over four years since DX11 debuted. To date, Microsoft has only revealed a few details of the next-generation API. Like AMD's Mantle, it will focus on giving developers "close-to-metal" GPU resource access and reducing CPU overhead. Like Mantle, the goal of DirectX 12 is to give programmers more control over performance tuning, with an eye towards better multi-threading and multi-GPU scaling. Unlike Mantle, DirectX 12 will undoubtedly support a full range of GPUs from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Qualcomm's presence is interesting. With Windows RT all but moribund, Qualcomm's interest in that market may have seemed incidental. However, the fact that the company is involved with the DX12 standard could mean that the handset and tablet developer is serious about the Windows market in the long term."

Re:so basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

>> it will focus on giving developers "close-to-metal" GPU resource access and reducing CPU overhead.

Translation: ...its finally been gutted of a lot of heavy Microsoft crapware and is now just a thin wrapper over the GPU vendor's own driver.

I wish the rest of Windows would go that way too.

Not at all, DirectX is actually surprisingly efficient, however modern GPU's nowadays are at the point where the bottleneck is now the CPU's ability to feed it. This has meant a rethink in the architecture with things like mantle to allow more offloading of the processing direct to the GPU, people don't seem to understand even mantle still requires DirectX or OpenGL on top of it, mantle is really more a replacement for a layer within these API's, not a complete API replacement.

Re:Why not open source it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use DirectX for some data visualization software (and occasional game in my free time) because it was easy to use and the systems our software was going to be used on was Windows anyway. But times change, we switched to OpenGL when we wanted to support other systems. An amusing benefit was being able to access features in Windows XP that people said couldn't handle it, a lie MS told about DirectX 10. If MS's top priority was making the best graphics possible, they could have gone with OpenGL, made it better (or some weird variation at least), then have the developers benefit both from contributions from MS and contributions from others. instead, they are forcing a choice, and more and more developers don't have the option of choosing DriectX, and not really missing it afterwards.