Most high performance console games are written in such a manner, thanks to the fact that consoles are fixed platforms and therefore easily allow this style of programming to be used. Something worth pointing out right away is that low level programming is not new or even all that uncommon. Why are we seeing so much interest in low level graphics programming on the PC? The short answer is performance, and more specifically what can be gained from returning to it. We have covered DirectX 12 in a great amount of detail over the past year, so for deeper coverage we’ll reference the appropriate articles, but in summary here is what DirectX 12 brings to the table and why it is a big deal.Įxcerpt from Microsoft Announces DirectX 12
Microsoft’s changes ultimately reach out and touch several aspects of the OS, but the bulk of these changes are being put in place to support DirectX 12, the next generation of Microsoft’s game & multimedia API. After a series of smaller changes in Windows 7 and Windows 8, for Windows 10 Microsoft has gone back to make what are the most fundamental changes to the graphics stack since Windows Vista over 8 years ago. Even after the release of Windows Vista and its massive overhaul of the graphics stack, Microsoft has continued modifying the stack over successive generations as GPUs have become more flexible and more capable.
Case in point (and getting to the subject matter of this section) is DirectX 12 and its underlying driver structure, the Windows Display Driver Model. Which is not to say that Microsoft hasn’t made low-level changes, only that those changes have been more deliberate and driven by specific needs. As a result Microsoft never significantly tampered with the Windows kernel through Windows 7 (6.1) and Windows 8 (6.2/6.3) – making small feature additions where it made sense to – and even the kernel version number of Windows 10 (10.0) is largely arbitrary, with its roots clearly in 6.x. After the massive reworking for Windows Vista (6.0), Windows finally reached a point where the kernel and other low-level components of the OS supported the necessary features and sported the required stability to drive Windows for generations to come. DirectX 12 & WDDM 2.0: Reworking the Windows Graphics StackĪt a low-level technical perspective, it’s perhaps a bit of a generalization though none the less true that Windows at the kernel is relatively stable and feature complete these days.
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