Jacques van Rhyn

Iterating on Variable Rate Shading in Gears Tactics

May 26th, 2020

Gears Tactics is the very first game to ship with support for DirectX 12 Variable Rate Shading (VRS), one of the major features in DirectX 12 Ultimate. VRS let Gears Tactics achieve large performance gains – up to 18.9% (!) – on a wide range of hardware with a minimal impact on visual quality. Check out this guest post where Jacob ...

DirectX 12 Ultimate Getting Started Guide

March 19th, 2020

So, you’re a developer sold on the next-gen features in DirectX 12 Ultimate? Look no further than this little guide! 1) OS The complete set of DirectX 12 Ultimate features is be available in the next retail version of Windows 10, version 2004 (also called the Windows 10 May 2020 Update). As of 5/27, you can get this version of ...

DirectX 12 and Fortnite

November 20th, 2019

On Monday, Epic Games announced that DirectX 12 support is coming to Fortnite. And today, the wait is over: anyone updating to the v11.20 patch has the option to try out Fortnite’s beta DX12 path! What does this all mean? Let's see if we can help!   What’s wrong with DX11? Nothing! We at the DirectX team designed ...

CPU- and GPU-boundedness

November 20th, 2019

We wrote this article to explain two key terms: CPU-bound and GPU-bound. There's some misinformation about this terms, and we're hoping this article can help fix this problem. Even though applications run on the CPU, many modern-day applications require a lot of GPU support. These apps generate a list of rendering instructions (i.e. the ...

Useful Links

July 1st, 2019

Below is a list of links that a DirectX 12 developer would find useful...

We’re upgrading to discord!

June 26th, 2019

We’re upgrading the directxtech.com forum to a Discord channel - go to https://discord.gg/directx to join today! We’re going to use our Discord channel in the same way as our directxtech.com forums, which means that game developers will still have a great resource to get their DirectX12 questions answered, file bug reports, and to give ...

DirectX 12 boosts performance of HITMAN 2

May 14th, 2019

Our partners at IO Interactive, the developers of the award-winning HITMAN franchise, recently added DirectX 12 support to HITMAN 2, with impressive results.  IO Interactive was so excited that they wanted to share a bit about how their innovative use of DirectX 12 benefits HITMAN gamers everywhere. The guest post below is from IO ...

Variable Rate Shading: a scalpel in a world of sledgehammers

March 18th, 2019

One of the sides in the picture below is 14% faster when rendered on the same hardware, thanks to a new graphics feature available only on DirectX 12. Can you spot a difference in rendering quality? Neither can we.  Which is why we’re very excited to announce that DirectX 12 is the first graphics API to offer broad hardware support ...