October 29th, 2020

DirectX 12 Ultimate for Holiday 2020

Jianye Lu
Program Manager

DirectX 12 Ultimate is the new gold standard for gaming graphics on both PC and the next generation of Xbox consoles: It delivers movie-quality visuals through DirectX Raytracing, boosts framerate through Variable Rate Shading, enables fast game load with beautiful high-resolution textures through Sampler Feedback, and unlocks vast open and detailed worlds through Mesh Shaders. An integral part of Microsoft’s commitment to gaming, DX12 Ultimate works synergistically with other innovations like Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Bar to bring the cohesive and high-performance experiences gamers deserve.

Since our announcement back in March, we have continued working with partners to bring next-gen gaming graphics to new hardware in time for the holidays, such as AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 Series graphics cards and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs. If you play on PC and want to level up your Windows 10 gaming experience with DX12 Ultimate, read on!

 

Find the right hardware

If you are upgrading your gaming PC or buying a new one, look no further than “DirectX 12 Ultimate” on the product page or retail boxes!

AMD recently announced their Radeon™ RX 6000 Series graphics cards, which deliver impressive support of the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set and the upcoming DirectStorage API. With the help of DX12 Ultimate, AMD’s new Radeon™ RX 6800 Series and RX 6900 XT graphics cards teleport you inside the action with the latest in visual technologies, enabling realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections along with new levels of detail. The new graphics cards will be available to gamers starting November 18th.

Both NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series and GeForce RTX 20 series GPUs also fully support DirectX 12 Ultimate. NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series, their 2nd gen RTX architecture, bring games to life with ultra-realistic visual effects and blazing fast frame rates. Check out more details on their DX12 Ultimate support.

Looking for a pre-built gaming PC? Make sure the graphics cards are from the list above so you can rest assured for the support for the latest graphics features.

 

Check support for DirectX 12 Ultimate in Xbox Game Bar

When you are putting your hands on a new gaming PC, it is easy to check whether your system is ready for next-gen gaming: just hit Win+G to bring up Xbox Game Bar, open Settings, and look under “Gaming features” to see if your PC is configured to support DirectX12 Ultimate. The link in the UI will also direct you to more details, including hardware upgrade light up these features.

Our friends from Xbox are making Xbox Game Bar the hub for PC gamer to customize and to control their gaming PCs. In the product update today, Xbox Game Bar also introduces other cool features, notably a new Resources widget which lets you not only see which apps are using up system resources, but also lets you shut them down from right there without leaving the game. Make sure to check their release blog post for more details.

DirectX 12 Ultimate in Xbox Game Bar

 

Find games using DX12 Ultimate features

Now we come to the final step: to find and download the games using DX12 Ultimate features to enjoy the next-gen gaming graphics!

To begin with, look at Xbox Game Pass – it is a great value to gamers and offers access to more than 100 high quality titles. Among those games, you will find Gears Tactics, the first PC game shipped with DirectX Variable Rate Shading and witnessed performance gains up to 18.9%. Other titles using DX12 Ultimate features are also coming to Xbox Game Pass.

AMD displayed several PC games using DX12 Ultimate features running on Radeon™ RX 6000 Series hardware in their product announcement, including Far Cry 6, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, Godfall, Dirt 5, and The Riftbreaker. Below is a demo clip from Dirt 5, where gamers will see the raytracing-based shadows by DirectX Raytracing, and improved framerate by Variable Rate Shading. Starting on October 29th, gamers will be able to watch other feature videos on different game titles featuring DirectX 12 Ultimate, and you can follow their featured games page for further updates.

 

NVIDIA also demonstrated a list of games coming this holiday on their GeForce RTX GPUs. The demo clip below shows how DirectX Raytracing brings cinematic level of reflections, diffuse illuminations, shadows, and ambient occlusions to gamers in Cyberpunk 2077. You can find more games on NVIDIA’s October update page.

 

Note that, all these games using DX12 Ultimate features will run nicely on all DirectX 12 Ultimate compliant hardware. And every month, more current and upcoming games join this ever-growing list.

 

Now let’s review the DX12 Ultimate checklist for PC gamers this holiday

Windows 10 May 2020 Update (aka. version 2004 or 20H1) or later [Link] Check
DX12 Ultimate compliant hardware [Link] Check
Xbox Game Bar to check support [Link] Check
Games that utilize DX12 Ultimate features [Link] Play!

 

Whether you play on Windows 10 PC or on the next generation of Xbox consoles, we hope you enjoy DirectX 12 Ultimate this holiday!

Author

Jianye Lu
Program Manager

Program Manager on the Graphics Team at Microsoft.

19 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

  • Matīss Rihards Vilcāns

    I don’t understand. I have GeForce RTX™ 2060 on my laptop, but my Game Bar with apparently the newest version (5.420.11102.0 after Windows update) says that my system does not support DirectX12 and the link there brings me to this site. Help?

  • awesome warrior

    just want to playiwhy do we have to use directx 12 i just want to play video games this ideaof tourtrerism is mean your mean xbox and your new prouct needs better cooling fans they over heat and go boomboom

  • Dieter Schweinsteiger

    Could this be why suddenly I can’t record others voices via discord in game? Its either my crew that gets recorded or just me. Never been a problem before.

  • Lakravgamin J

    i cant screen record because my mother wont buy me a PC

    • Lakravgamin J

      meeeeeee tooooooooooo

  • Dave Bacher

    Is DXDiag working correctly for Ultimate?

    NVidia 2080 TI in a Crossfire Hero VII Wifi is reporting as DirectX 12 Ultimate “Disabled” with the current DXDiag, and on feature list 12.2 is not reported. However, Game Bar lists it and it does appear to query correctly in games.

  • william idut

    I have an rx 5700 xt. Does this mean I will not support direct x storage or any other feature that comes with dx12U ?

    • Eli Bristol

      most likely the direct storage api will be supported, but everything else will likely not as you lack the graphics hardware for features like vrs and ray tracing, you will still be able to play directx12 games though.

  • Tao Christensen

    UGHHH I CANT SCEEN RECORD

    • Kristin Marchbank

      After trying to figure out for three days why my screen record doesn’t work…. “Your System does not support Game X features 12”. 🙁

      • ravuri sravani

        Same problem.. but i searched a lot to solve .. this feature is very needed to me .. anyone have an idea. please add a reply ..

      • Lakravgamin J

        yeah me too i dont know what to do i recomend obs studio for recording

      • anonymous

        this comment has been deleted.

  • Adele Jenner

    I have an RTX 3080 but my gamebar doesnt say I am DX12U ready?

    • Maico De Blasio

      Upon first reading the article, I also was missing the ‘Gaming features’ option in the Game Bar. My system updated to Windows 20H2 during the week, however, and now ‘Gaming features’ is exposed. After the Windows update, your Xbox Game Bar version should be 5.420.10222.0.

      • Aaron Painter

        I was also missing the "Gaming Features" option in Game Bar settings. But, I had Windows 20H2 installed already.
        To fix this, I had to go into Windows Store. Look at my list of installed apps and download Game Bar. I had to do this from the app list. If you go the Game Bar page, there was only the option to launch.
        I then had to restart my PC for the Game Bar update...

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    • Nathan Rothermel

      You can update the Game bar from windows store. I’d guess preinstalled Game bar doesn’t show this information.

    • Steven Priestley

      i think you need to update windows as well

  • Ehsan Samavati

    DirectX is a technical tool that helps game developers interact with sound and graphics cards. Although it can be installed on any computer, most users won’t ever need it. It runs when you play a game made with DirectX and that’s it. You’re only going to need to get to know it better if you want to program with it yourself. It has one of the most agile runtime processes amongst this category. وودمارت

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