#CONTROL DIRECTX 11 OR 12 PC#

Ask your IT manager which they’d rather do? Pop in a new video card or replace the whole box. That sounds unintuitive but the fact is, there’s nothing stopping a DirectX 12 enabled machine from fully running VMs on these video cards. The GPU wars will really take off as each vendor will now be able to come up with some amazing tools to offload work onto GPUs.Ĭloud computing is, ironically, going to be the biggest beneficiary of DirectX 12. Oversimplified to be sure but it’s why everyone is so excited about this. It is still a big boost over DirectX 9 where only 1 dedicated thread was allowed to talk to the GPU but it’s still only scratching the surface.ĭirectX 12: Every core can talk to the GPU at the same time and, depending on the driver, I could theoretically start taking control and talking to all those cores. The reasons are obvious.ĭirectX 11: Your CPU communicates to the GPU 1 core to 1 core at a time. The reality is, as in, the real-world, non-benchmark results I’ve seen from Mantle (and presumable DirectX 12 when it’s ready) are far beyond this. I’m been part of (non-NDA) meetings where we’ve discussed having to low-ball performance gains to being “only” 40%. In fact, most benchmarks that have been talked about have been understated because they seem unbelievable. Mantle already does this and the results are spectacular. How long has your computer been multi-core?īut DirectX 12? In theory, all your cores can talk to the GPU simultaneously. Think about how limiting that has been for game developers. I want you to think about that for a moment. And exactly 1 of them at a time can talk to the GPU.

#CONTROL DIRECTX 11 OR 12 PC#

Meanwhile, your PC might have 4, 8 or more CPU cores on it. And with DirectX 11, I can talk to exactly 1 of them at a time. Last Fall, Nvidia released the Geforce GTX 970. It’s almost as bad as those people who think we should be injecting assembly language into our source code. Getting “closer” to the hardware is relatively meaningless at this point. None of this has to do with getting close to the hardware. It’s not about getting close to the hardwareĮvery time I hear someone say “but X allows you to get close to the hardware” I want to shake them.

Thus, you still ended up with 1 CPU core talking to 1 GPU core. This was nice but the pipeline to the GPU was still serialized. Up until DirectX 9, the CPU, being 1 core in those days, would talk to the GPU through the “main” thread.ĭirectX 10 improved things a bit by allowing multiple cores send jobs to the GPU.

Since the start of the PC, we have had the PC and the GPU (or at least, the “video card”). If someone wants to send me a chart to put in this article, I’ll update. This article is an extreme oversimplification. Unlike previous versions of DirectX, the difference between the new DirectX and previous generations are obvious enough that they can be explained in charts (and maybe someone with some visual design skill can do this).

Control directx 11 or 12