Microsoft announces DirectX 12 Ultimate with next generation graphics features

Microsoft today announced DirectX 12 Ultimate, the culmination of the best graphics technology from Microsoft. DirectX 12 Ultimate comes with all the next generation graphics hardware features, including DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback. When you buy a graphics hardware with the DX12 Ultimate logo or an Xbox Series X, you can be confident that it will support all the next gen graphics hardware.

DX12 Ultimate brings them all together in one common bundle, providing developers with a single key to unlock next generation graphics on PC and Xbox Series X.

Along with the DX12 Ultimate, Microsoft also announced that they are releasing PIX graphics optimization tool and open-source HLSL compiler that will enable developers to squeeze every last drop of performance out of DX12 Ultimate hardware. Despite adding several next generation features, Microsoft mentioned that next-generation games which use DX12 Ultimate features will continue to run on non-DX12 Ultimate hardware. With DirectX 12 Ultimate, Microsoft has unified the graphics platform across PC and Xbox Series X.

No longer do the cycles operate independently! Instead, they now combine synergistically: when Xbox Series X releases, there will already be many millions of DX12 Ultimate PC graphics cards in the world with the same feature set, catalyzing a rapid adoption of new features, and when Xbox Series X brings a wave of new console gamers, PC will likewise benefit from this vast surge of new DX12 Ultimate capable hardware!

The complete set of DirectX 12 Ultimate features will be available in the next version of Windows 10, version 2004 (20H1). Until then, you can get DirectX 12 Ultimate features in the Windows Insider builds. You can learn more about DirectX 12 Ultimate from the link below.

Source: Microsoft