DirectX 12 Promises Movie-Quality Graphics In Real Time
Microsoft's Direct3D 12 could be efficient and powerful enough to allow graphics engines to render CGI-quality game scenes in real time.
DirectX 12 is coming in late 2015 and will be part of Windows 10. Microsoft has already talked about some the basic rendering features that will be coming to both the Direct3D 11.3 and 12, such as the
Rasterizer Ordered Views; Typed UAV Load ; Volume Tiled Resources; and Conservative Raster.
Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Studios, published on his blog some slides that compare the performance of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12.
According to those slides, DirectX 12 renders a frame significantly faster than DirectX 11, as DirectX 12 splits load across multiple cores while DirectX 11 does everything on a single core. This should allow for better graphics performance for PC gamers. However, the real world improvement depends heavily on both the developer and the game.
The PC is where the most performance gains will come from and, according to Wardell, we should one day be able to experience real-time graphics performance comparable to the quality of a 3D movie.
But despite the potential of DX12, it is not sure whether
any PC graphic hardware (plus CPU) will be able to deliver this kind of immersion to PC gamers anytime soon.