DirectX has been with us now for over 20 years, when it was first released on September 1995 as the Windows Games SDK for Windows 95.
Techradar has written up a nice little article on what the latest iteration of DirectX (12), and it means to PC gamers:
“DX12’s focus is on enabling a dramatic increase in visual richness through a significant decrease in API-related CPU overhead,” said Nvidia’s Henry Moreton last year. “Historically, drivers and OS software have managed memory, state, and synchronization on behalf of developers. However, inefficiencies result from the imperfect understanding of an application’s needs. DX12 gives the application the ability to directly manage resources and state, and perform necessary synchronization. As a result, developers of advanced applications can efficiently control the GPU, taking advantage of their intimate knowledge of the game’s behavior.”
By dumping more tasks onto the graphics chip, the main processor has less to do, thus the game isn’t bogged down by what’s going on in the operating system’s background. The more cores the better, meaning a processor with two cores (aka two processors crammed into one package) isn’t quite as perky as a processor with four cores.
The same is true with a graphics chip, and you can get a speed boost if you install two of the same graphics chip into a system (known as SLI via Nvidia and CrossFire via AMD). With DirectX 12, games will likely see better performance because the load is tossed between the multiple cores simultaneously instead of dumping loads onto one core at a time.
Read more at Techradar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4cXG8zu61Y
