News - Microsoft DirectX 12 reveal teased for GDC 2014

[HEXUS]

"Rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated," Tweets the DirectX 12 account.

Read more.

[crossy]

AMD's Roy Taylor Tweeted in response to the rumours; "AMD loves open standards and fair competition. DX, OpenGL, Mantle; if it's good for gamers it's good for all".

Is DX an open standard? Thought it was pretty proprietary and tightly integrated with a particular versions of Windows?

With major new versions of DirectX usually launched with new versions of Windows it is expected that DirectX 12 will probably be part of Windows 9 when that OS is released.

That's my biggest gripe with DX - that you only get two versions per OS level. So Windows 7 got 11.0 and 11.1, Windows 8 gets 11.1 and 11.2, presumably Windows 9 will get 12.0 and 12.1.

Why can't I get - for example, DX11.2 on Windows7? (Not that I think I necessarily would notice the difference, but it's the principle ... lol)

[lumireleon]

DX12 will probably be available for Windows 8, DX11 is extremely high tech only that DX12 will be more efficient enabling hardware to handle more 4K power.

[abychristy]

Well this means better GPU and quality games and it should be beter than Mantle .

[pastymuncher]

Yet a huge amount of games being released are still DX9 so i don't see what the big deal is.

[Jingee]

Why can't I get - for example, DX11.2 on Windows7? (Not that I think I necessarily would notice the difference, but it's the principle ... lol)

Because MS will make less money.

[scaryjim]

AMD's Roy Taylor Tweeted in response to the rumours; "AMD loves open standards and fair competition. DX, OpenGL, Mantle; if it's good for gamers it's good for all".

Is DX an open standard? Thought it was pretty proprietary and tightly integrated with a particular versions of Windows?

Don't confuse open standards with open source. DX11 is (afaik) an open API that can be implemented by any vendor - and I guess theoretically^[1] it should even be possible to do an open port of DX to any platform (much the way .NET was ported by the mono project).

That's my biggest gripe with DX - that you only get two versions per OS level. So Windows 7 got 11.0 and 11.1, Windows 8 gets 11.1 and 11.2, presumably Windows 9 will get 12.0 and 12.1.

Why can't I get - for example, DX11.2 on Windows7? (Not that I think I necessarily would notice the difference, but it's the principle ... lol)

You can't get DX11.2 on Win 7 because "MS said so". Kind of their perogative, although the reasoning is beyond me. That said, DX point releases very rarely add anything woth shouting about, so Win 7 users probably aren't missing out on much.

I'd be amazed if you DX12 isn't made available for Win 7 though. AFAIK the underlying OS isn't actually going to change going to Win 9 (i.e. it'll still be a point release of Windows NT 6). Even when Win 9 is released, Win 7 will still be a major end user OS and if MS don't make their latest API available to those end users game devs will go elsewhere - to Open GL, Mantle, or whatever.

Perhaps what we're seeing here is what AMD actually wanted all along with Mantle - to shake up the API market a little and force the major API providers to innovate.

^[1]this is more supposition on my part than based on any inherent knowledge of the way the DX API is published: I'd welcome clarification from anyone who is more in the know

[zaph0d]

Yet a huge amount of games being released are still DX9 so i don't see what the big deal is.

The reason for so many DX9 games and lack of DX10/11 games is a two parter.

Part 1 - Reason: Microsoft refused to allow installation of DX10/11 on windows XP.
Explanation: Games companies want to make money, they could make games that use DX 10/11 for a small (but slowly growing) number of computers that look great or make DX9 games for almost every computer that look not quite as good.
Part 2 - Reason: Previous Gen Consoles used Geforce 7800 & Ati X1800 based parts.
Explanation: These parts were the last of the DX9 generation and even with 'to the metal' optomisation there's only so much optomising that can be done with the shader technology in the chip. Seeing as so many games were designed to run on both consoles and PC ported the amount of work required to port the engine up to DX10/11 for pc wasn't worth the extra capital expense - see Part 1.

Good News - Most PC's are now running DX10+ hardware and have DX11+ installed and the current gen consoles both have DX11+ based gpu's so we should see more DX11+ games for the next few years.

Bad News - Microsoft are likely to lock DX12 to Windows 9+ like they did with DX10 & Vista to try to get more to upgrade thereby shooting themselves in the foot (yet again) by running us into the same issues, people will not upgrade their OS for greater DX support if there aren't enough games to warrent the upgrade and games companies will not make the games if there aren't enough potential customers to sell to and the cycle continues once again.

And now for something completely different.

[scaryjim]

... Bad News - Microsoft are likely to lock DX12 to Windows 9+ like they did with DX10 & Vista ....

I kind of agree with you right up to this point. Vista had a completely different code base to XP, and to me it makes sense not to backport DX10 to the older Windows version - I suspect it would have been a lot of extra work. When Win 7 / DX11 came out, Vista got a DX11 update, which makes sense as it's the same major version so much less work.

Win 9 is likely to be another 6.X release, which means the same major version as 8/7/Vista. I could see them not supporting Vista on DX12, as Vista never really got mass market traction, but - unless they don't care about developers using the new API - I can't see them ignoring the massive installed Win 7 user base.

Of course, the other thing DX11 brought to the table was hardware support fallback. Anyone who has a DX9 card running under Win 7 is almost certainly actually running DX11 on it - you can code DX11 to fall back to DX9 mode (this is how 3DMark runs its DX9 and DX10 benchmarks). Assuming DX12 has the same feature, it should be very tempting for devs to develop in DX12 knowing they can create fallback profiles for DX11, 10, and 9 and support a wider range of hardware - particularly if the DX12 features allow them to get closer to the metal and eliminate some of the threading bottleneck that persuaded AMD to pursue Mantle in the first place...

[shaithis]

TBH, I cannot see them making it Windows 9 only. They just had a hellish time pushing MUI out there.....they don't want to anger people further and this seems quite a knee-jerk reaction to mantle.......so why would you make such an announcement (due to being afraid you might lose developers to other platforms) and then not support ANY of your current installed userbase?

But then again, it is Microsoft and they do feel they can do what they want (and to a certain degree, they are right...)

[crossy]

Don't confuse open standards with open source. DX11 is (afaik) an open API that can be implemented by any vendor - and I guess theoretically^[1] it should even be possible to do an open port of DX to any platform (much the way .NET was ported by the mono project).

Hmm, maybe I'm being a "negative nellie" but I suspect anyone trying to reverse engineer DX11 to do a "compatible" would get a phalanx of Microsoft lawyers bombarding them with "cease and desist" orders. Now DX11 source, that might be interesting...

Good point about Mono - I've dabbled with that and, I'm ashamed to say, while it was a bit limited it was actually pretty darned good. Maybe Microsoft had a point about it being better than Java (not bleedin' difficult)?

TBH, I cannot see them making it Windows 9 only. They just had a hellish time pushing MUI out there.....they don't want to anger people further and this seems quite a knee-jerk reaction to mantle.......so why would you make such an announcement (due to being afraid you might lose developers to other platforms) and then not support ANY of your current installed userbase?

There's a flipside to that argument though. Make DX12 "compelling" and don't allow it on any non-MUI platform and you've got a siren-song to encourage gamers to switch from "nasty old" Windows 7 to the "newie MUI hotness" (to paraphrase Will Smith in MiB). And that is a big deal for Microsoft - make MUI "comfortable" to a lot more folks and get those millions of dollars in upgrade fees. Then, as pointed out elsewhere, there's the "halo" effect that WP8 becomes a deal more attractive.

I honestly can't see me being able to avoid Windows 9. Ignoring that it might actually be pretty decent, I suspect that there will be a lot of new tech or new features that will require Windows 9. Heck, as long as I can import my Windows 7 user easily then bring it on.

[azrael-]

Isn't it about time to stop calling it DirectX? There's hardly anything left of DirectX other than Direct3D. Now, if they could see their way to introducing hardware accelerated audio again...

[Torashin]

Well this means better GPU and quality games and it should be beter than Mantle .

Why on earth would DX12 be better than mantle?! M$, - a company full of greedy idiots - is trying to trim down a fat and bloated mess of an API to make it run faster.
AMD, - a company that knows how games and GPU's work as well as anyone - is aiming to build the perfect API from scratch.

[fma965]

So MANTLE or DX12? Hmm... time will tell.

[Flavius]

When I read the headline I thought that Mantle is already dead, but after reading through the comments I'm starting to think that this might be good for Mantle and all gamers.