Microsoft celebrates 10 years of DirectX12

Was DirectX12 worth it?

  • Yes

    Votes: 8 17.0%

  • No

    Votes: 27 57.4%

  • Don't know, don't care.

    Votes: 12 25.5%
  • Total voters
    47
winjer

winjer

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devblogs.microsoft.com

Celebrating 10 Years of DirectX 12 - DirectX Developer Blog

Microsoft is committed to bringing you a great gaming experience and in honor of the 10th anniversary of DirectX 12, we're happy to celebrate some of our achievements with you all
devblogs.microsoft.com devblogs.microsoft.com

DirectX12 shipped in 2015 with a simple goal: give developers more control so games run faster, look better, and scale across Windows PC and console. Over the last decade, DirectX 12 delivered on that promise. We added features and made it easier for developers to focus on gameplay & graphics by providing more flexibility and achievable performance wins. We built technologies that dramatically reduce load times and deliver consistently high frames for a polished gaming experience in the most demanding of titles. Our platform's continuous evolution brought advanced visuals previously unimaginable into the mainstream. Today, DirectX 12 sits at the heart of many AAA titles and modern game engines, powering some of the most visually stunning games ever made.

Happy 10th birthday DirectX 12, here are some of the biggest milestones that made games better!
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DirectX 12 Ultimate: Unlocking Realism, Control, & Performance (2018-2020)

DirectX 12 makes games run faster and more efficiently by giving developers closer control of the hardware. To accomplish this, we examine how hardware is evolving to ensure we are best equipped to leverage all its potential. In 2018, the ecosystem began introducing dedicated ray-tracing hardware in consumer-level graphics cards for the first time. We responded with DirectX Raytracing (DXR) that same year, a major leap that let games simulate how light bounces through a scene in real time. With this innovation, scenes come alive with film quality lighting, realistic shadows, and multidimensional reflections so gamers can best experience this significant shift in simulating how light interacts with every single object in a virtual scene as it happens. DXR moved effects that were previously only possible in movies into playable games for hundreds of titles that were unachievable with traditional rasterization, fundamentally revamping entire rendering pipelines and greatly elevating the bar for photorealistic games.

Our explicit control model lets developers choose where to spend GPU effort. Variable Rate Shading enables studios to boost detail where it matters most and ease efforts where it's less impactful to gamers by specifying at what rates rendering performance and power are allocated across an image. Producing sharper visuals and enabling some games up to 14% faster rendering on the same hardware by reducing wasted cycles and enhancing detail in games. Mesh Shaders gives developers more efficient ways to cull and process geometry to render only the necessary parts of a scene, reducing driver overhead and enabling higher, more stable frame rates during gameplay for richer and more dynamic open worlds.

We unified these next generation graphics features along with Sampler Feedback under a single forward compatible standard with DirectX 12 Ultimate in 2020. DirectX12 Ultimate became a badge of honor on hardware and symbol of assurance for customers, with the promise of compatibility for these features. Solidifying our commitment to make these advanced rendering techniques easier to adopt across the industry for next generation games, DirectX 12 Ultimate enables developers to target Windows PCs and consoles with one advanced feature set designed for cutting edge visuals and scalable performance.
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Enriching Visual Experience in Existing Games (2021)

We introduced visual enhancements with wider color and brightness ranges through AutoHDR, enriching visuals in existing games with system-level support, with no studio work required. These advancements make old school games feel as vivid as players remember them by bringing modern display quality to beloved classics for their dedicated loyal fanbases.
Click to expand...

Enriching Visual Experience in Existing Games (2021)

We introduced visual enhancements with wider color and brightness ranges through AutoHDR, enriching visuals in existing games with system-level support, with no studio work required. These advancements make old school games feel as vivid as players remember them by bringing modern display quality to beloved classics for their dedicated loyal fanbases.
Click to expand...

Unlocking New Levels of Parallelism for Efficiency and Flexibility (2024)

Modern games demand more simultaneous work than ever, which makes maximizing hardware utilization essential for delivering next-generation experiences. DirectX 12 empowers developers to orchestrate massively parallel tasks directly on the GPU with Work Graphs, enabling unprecedented flexibility and efficiency in how workloads are both scheduled and executed. This innovation allows dynamic, granular control over rendering and compute operations, paving the way for richer worlds, more responsive gameplay, and advanced effects scaling seamlessly across devices. By streamlining the management of complex dependencies and unlocking new forms of parallelism, Work Graphs set the stage for the next wave of graphics advancements in gaming.
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Future Focus: Optimizations for Cutting Edge Graphics Innovations (2025+ Beyond)

DirectX continues to prepare for the next wave of rendering innovations. These cutting-edge graphics innovations remain the focus of the future, and we are already working to best prepare support for them for all devices through better optimizations. We began (and plan to continue) to further optimize with a preview of Opacity Micromaps in path traced scenes, reducing shader work significantly making dense detail cheaper to render and unlocking this technology for all, not just the highest-end systems. Keeping in mind our goal of not sacrificing performance for these new graphically intensive worlds, we are improving framerates alongside them with Shader Execution Reordering, in preview already achieving large double digit framerate boosts on high-end NVIDIA and Intel GPUs and notable gains on other configurations.

We further refined frames with Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) by precompiling and delivering shaders in the cloud, minimizing disruptive stuttering and reducing load times by as much as 85% in some titles. ASD shipped just a few months ago with the ROG Xbox Ally in October 2025 and required no work from game studios to integrate. Making our technologies easier to adopt is a top objective as we expand support for ASD across more games and devices, working in collaboration with game developers to integrate this capability directly into game engines.

That's not all, we have begun experimenting with how we can accelerate rendering to better support these complex effects with a successful preview of Cooperative Vectors, helping maintain gaming performance alongside rapidly growing graphics and compute capabilities. We intend to further evolve this effort and introduce an expanded suite of Linear Algebra capabilities in a future shader model release. Unifying both matrix-matrix and vector-matrix capabilities under a single design to provide a consistent and scalable foundation for high-performance shader code, unlocking robust GPU acceleration for bedrock AI/ML computations within the graphics pipeline.
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DirectX12 brought us a ton of new stuff, such as low level access to hardware, better CPU parallelization, ray-tracing, async computing, mesh shaders, autohdr, ect.
But also, industrial doses of stuttering in modern games. So was it worth it?

And the question remains, when will we see DirectX 13?
 
12 Years of Stutter

My Guy Thank You GIF by DRODIAN™ BRAND
 
I'm surprised we've been on this for so long. I remember when it felt like dx9 was around forever and that was what 4 years?
 
Nothing wrong with DX12 on a technical level. All its problems come down to Microsoft almost treating it as abandonware post launch and not working with developers to properly utilise its features, leaving them to figure it all out.
 
onQ123 said:
I remember when DX12 was going to magically make Xbox One outperform PS4 😭
Click to expand...
- wait for the tools
- wait for dx12
- wait for vrr
- wait for vrs
- wait for frs
- wait for e3
- wait for //build
- wait for next year
- wait for next year
- wait for next year
- wait for next year
- wait for next year

pulse GIF
 
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I will celebrate the day all developers abandon DX and move over exclusively to Vulkan.

for the record, I have nothing against DX12. I would prefer it be gone as it would remove a layer of translation since it causes nvidia performance to suffer
 
Last edited:
StoopKidz said:
I don't understand what DirectX even is and at this point am too afraid to ask.
Click to expand...

i asked chatgpt to explain to a 5 year old what is dx12


DX12 (DirectX 12) is how games talk to your computer's graphics card.

Here's the very simple version:

  • Think of a game as a boss giving orders
  • Think of the graphics card as a worker
Old systems (like DX11):

  • The boss talks through a slow assistant
  • Orders get delayed
  • The worker waits a lot
DX12:

  • The boss talks directly to the worker
  • Less waiting
  • More work gets done faster
What that means for you:

  • Games can run faster
  • Better use of CPU and GPU
  • More detailed graphics without slowing down as much
One important thing:

  • DX12 is harder for developers, so if a game is badly made, DX12 won't magically fix it.
In one sentence:
DX12 helps games use your computer's power more efficiently, so things can run smoother when done right.
 
I didn't know that the day of the discovery of venereal diseases is also celebrated...
Just burn it in the fire and move on to Vulcan.
 
Last edited:
Let's all celebrate 10 years of st-st-stuttering!
 
DX12 exposed a lot of devs since they couldn't rely on dx11 driver level hacks to fix performance for them, they have to do it all themselves; when they do it's a pure upgrade over dx11
 
Gonzito said:
i asked chatgpt to explain to a 5 year old what is dx12


DX12 (DirectX 12) is how games talk to your computer's graphics card.

Here's the very simple version:

  • Think of a game as a boss giving orders
  • Think of the graphics card as a worker
Old systems (like DX11):

  • The boss talks through a slow assistant
  • Orders get delayed
  • The worker waits a lot
DX12:

  • The boss talks directly to the worker
  • Less waiting
  • More work gets done faster
What that means for you:

  • Games can run faster
  • Better use of CPU and GPU
  • More detailed graphics without slowing down as much
One important thing:

  • DX12 is harder for developers, so if a game is badly made, DX12 won't magically fix it.
In one sentence:
DX12 helps games use your computer's power more efficiently, so things can run smoother when done right.
Click to expand...
  • DX12 is harder for developers, so if a game is badly made, DX12 won't magically fix it.

    This is a very important bullet point

A LOT of optimization was done by drivers (AMD/Nvidia). With Directx 12 devs couldnt rely on those drivers anymore. Chaos ensued with tons of badly optimized games being launched on PC.

So fuck DX 12
 
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