DirectX 12

Joe March

I'm not sure if there is another thread of this out there, but I just saw this video and was pretty blown away, but I do have a question: What does DX12 Entail that is different from DX11? all that's mentioned in this video is extra polygon density, and extra resolution in maps, are we doing more displacement mapping? Are we changing any workflows?

Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=36&v=rpDdOIZy-4k

Ged

impressive! was that 4 geforce gtx titans just to run that demo!?

JedTheKrampus

DirectX 12 and Vulkan mean that draw calls have extremely low overhead and you'll be able to push a lot more of them without a performance problem. They make compute shaders first-class citizens, making it so that you have to jump through fewer hoops to get certain advanced rendering techniques working like clustered rendering, strand simulation, or hybrid raytracing. Multi-GPU rendering is apparently much, much easier to implement as well, and it's theoretically possible to even use GPUs from different vendors to share the workload of rendering a frame. They're also loads easier to write the drivers for because there's less of a need to support legacy CAD applications and older games, and the architecture is closer to that of modern GPUs compared to OpenGL's state machine (for instance.) For end-users of the API this means that the API's behavior should be more consistent between vendors.

Both APIs are basically AMD's Mantle with a fresh coat of paint.

Tobbo

File sizes are going to be HUGE! Haha, looks good though!

[Deleted User]

Joe March wrote: »

What does DX12 Entail that is different from DX11? all that's mentioned in this video is extra polygon density, and extra resolution in maps, are we doing more displacement mapping? Are we changing any workflows?

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019

Needles

Oh i cant wait to get my own 9000 dollar pc so i can also experience the power of DX12 ~______~

ZacD

You can get DX12 with a $500 PC.

Needles

Yes but a $500 pc will surely not be able to push the kind of things they are peddling in that video in a game environment.

Unless they found out how to stuff 4 titans into one card.

This is very impressive otherwise, but im pretty sure they aren't trying to sell this to gamers.

ZacD

You can get a GTX 970 and request the DirectX 12 build of UE4 from Microsoft and start playing it it today if you really want to, along with Voxel GI, there's tons of new tech that runs on normal hardware if you look for it.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?65843-Unreal-Engine-and-Direct-X-12&p=265954&viewfull=1#post265954

Visceral

Yeah but 4x Gtx Titans, i would expect no less.

Like 1 of them is almost as much as my montly salery after tax...jesus christ

EDIT: If gamers complained about the GTA game size then enjoy having to download thoose 8k's in the future. Are we going back to physical media in the future? I mean here in Sweden we dont have datacaps on our broadband but something has to change if we are getting larger and larger games.

Rockley Bonner

Dix12 can handle more dix than dix11. The more dix the higher the processing power.

Tobbo

Visceral wrote: »

Yeah but 4x Gtx Titans, i would expect no less.

4 GTX Titans is probably a bit overkill. DirectX12 doesn't require all of that and should be just as affordable as building a PC today is.

marks

JedTheKrampus wrote: »

DirectX 12 and Vulkan mean that draw calls have extremely low overhead and you'll be able to push a lot more of them without a performance problem. They make compute shaders first-class citizens, making it so that you have to jump through fewer hoops to get certain advanced rendering techniques working like clustered rendering, strand simulation, or hybrid raytracing. Multi-GPU rendering is apparently much, much easier to implement as well, and it's theoretically possible to even use GPUs from different vendors to share the workload of rendering a frame. They're also loads easier to write the drivers for because there's less of a need to support legacy CAD applications and older games, and the architecture is closer to that of modern GPUs compared to OpenGL's state machine (for instance.) For end-users of the API this means that the API's behavior should be more consistent between vendors.

Both APIs are basically AMD's Mantle with a fresh coat of paint.

Cheap drawcalls is definitely exciting, as are any and all improvements to compute shaders!

ZacD

The silly thing is DX12s adoption completely depends on the adoption of Windows 10, if gaming customers don't switch, not many games will use it.

Shiniku

ZacD wrote: »

The silly thing is DX12s adoption completely depends on the adoption of Windows 10, if gaming customers don't switch, not many games will use it.

I know microsoft could still shit the bed on this, but based on what I've seen so far of Windows 10 and the fact that they're offering free upgrades for the first year, I think we're gonna see some of the highest new OS adoption rates in years.

beefaroni

ZacD wrote: »

The silly thing is DX12s adoption completely depends on the adoption of Windows 10, if gaming customers don't switch, not many games will use it.

The silly thing is DX10s adoption completely depends on the adoption of Windows Vista, if gaming customers don't switch, not many games will use it.

10 is also a free upgrade for 7/8 users.

ZacD

DirectX10 did have a slow adoption, I can only think of 3 or 4 games that used it, most skipped to DX11. And Vulkan is there as an alternative.

beefaroni

But DX11 is also Windows Vista and above.

I'm just saying it's not the first time that this has happened and it ended up working out, if not slowly.

CrazyButcher

JedTheKrampus wrote: »

Both APIs are basically AMD's Mantle with a fresh coat of paint.

It's a bit more than fresh coat of paint imo. While AMD did provide Khronos Mantle for Vulkan, the design of Vulkan is still in flux and influenced by multiple parties, especially vendors whose hardware works very differently than what AMD's architecture/mantle is designed for... Though the core principles to achieve less CPU costs (threading model, pipeline objects, cmdbuffers...) are indeed similar across all new apis.

there will be some new rendering features with the new apis (dx12 and 11.3)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn903943(v=vs.85).aspx
though the core focus is really cpu-cost reduction and therefore I'd expect a bit more "dynamics" more moving objects on screen.

and yes ideally Vulkan, which sees lots of interest by multiple big game developers, allows to avoid the forced OS migration... but keep in mind that certain things will remain "faster" with Windows 10, simply because the display driver model has been improved again.

iadagraca

I remember reading something about being able to use more than 4 active lights at a time. That more lights can render shadows and such at once.

I don't think there was a limit either.

Visceral wrote: »

EDIT: If gamers complained about the GTA game size then enjoy having to download thoose 8k's in the future. Are we going back to physical media in the future? I mean here in Sweden we dont have datacaps on our broadband but something has to change if we are getting larger and larger games.

Wouldn't surprise me, i've heard next is cartridges/sd cards instead of disks since those are getting cheaper to make and are a lot faster.

This also would make more sense of tablets if that ever takes off having dedicated graphics or something.

ZacD

Well with substance you can have any resolution texture you want with a tiny download size, 16k no problem. Or we could start seeing better use of detail textures instead of going overboard on resolution.

Jerc

I don't think we'll see gigantic (8k+) textures widely used in games anytime soon, but rather more materials on each objects, smarter masking and higher polycount.

Even the movie/animation industry is trying to get away from the "let's put 16k textures everywhere" mindset. It's more a cost issue than a technical limitation one.

gsokol

I don't know how much SSDs fix this, but with all that data being shoved around...8k texture and such, wouldn't we start seeing the bottleneck shift to read/write speeds from disk?

ZacD

Ram/Vram becomes a bottleneck first.

Jerc

Acutally on new consoles, the bottleneck starts to be the read speed from disk already. Mandatory installs are a temporary workaround for this, but even from the hard drive, filling up 8GB of ram quick enough to avoid endless loading times is a challenge.

Technix

Looks more like an nvidia hardware demo than a dx12 demo. The artwork and rendering is very high quality but it has nothing much to do with dx12 which the main advantage is lowering the overhead of cpu to gpu communication.

Having giant textures and millions of polygons in a single small scene where everything is loaded in memory at once is only down to the power of the video card, not the api.

Show a scene with many unique objects switched in and out of memory and many thousands of drawcalls, because that is where dx12 makes a huge difference. Show a back to back comparison from dx11 to dx12 running on a single 980 for example, something that people can relate to.

Really disappointing to see such a missleading video being circulated as a dx12 demo.

Goeddy

there actually is another nvidea techdemovideo where they show thousands of instanced houses being rendered in realtime even with a speedcomparison to DX11 if i remember right.

but yeah this video realy isnt the best they could do, even artisticly it is not that special

Torch

Rockley Bonner wrote: »

Dix12 can handle more dix than dix11. The more dix the higher the processing power.

I have a query. How many Dix do you need to ideally get a truly satisfying experience? I mean I'm guessing the more Dix, the better right? Is there any point where a person might not be able to handle any more Dix?

almighty_gir

Torch wrote: »

I have a query. How many Dix do you need to ideally get a truly satisfying experience? I mean I'm guessing the more Dix, the better right? Is there any point where a person might not be able to handle any more Dix?

Yeah, you need more windows in order to get more dix. if you only have 8 windows or less, you won't get any extra dix.

Ruz

directx 13 will have real dinosaurs

Needles

Ruz wrote: »

directx 13 will have real dinosaurs

Oh please!!! xD