typically when we get excited about improvements to gaming performance it's
because of some new piece of hardware like a high refresh rate monitor or a
graphics card that's beefier than a porterhouse stake
but microsoft has come out with a new piece of software that looks like it
should give your visuals a significant boost in terms of both quality and
performance it's called directx 12 ultimate and despite the tacky gamer
sounding name it features technical optimizations that should really make a
difference the first big change is about ray tracing
you can learn more about ray tracing in general in this video but in a nutshell
it's a technique in which your GPU can track where light rays are going in a
scene to give a much more realistic light and shadow effects than you'd
otherwise get reflections look amazing ray tracing support first became
widespread on consumer graphics cards with NVIDIA's release of their high-end
rtx 2000 series but directx 12 ultimate
will not only support ray tracing on both NVIDIA and AMD cards but it should
lighten the load on your system to make the technology more accessible to all
now developers are going to have more control over the process instead of just
letting the system decide how to schedule ray tracing through a process
called inline ray tracing essentially this makes the processing of simpler
lighting effects more efficient since the developer is telling the GPU exactly
when to trace a certain effect instead of forcing the GPU to spend processing
resources trying to decide on its own the dx12 ultimate API also eases the
load on your CPU as originally the shaders on your GPU had to talk to the
CPU to start ray tracing a scene now your GPU can just do this on its own
allowing for faster processing overall hopefully leading to ray tracing support
in more games with lower hardware requirements for an eye pleasing
experience moving on mesh shading should also prevent your GPU from rendering
parts of the scene that you'll never even see suppose you're playing a
high-end aaa title with thousands of detailed objects in each scene that's a
lot for your GPU to handle as it might have to draw trillions of little
triangles every frame in extreme cases
but your eye can only detect so much detail right imagine you're looking at a
faraway mountain for example you're not going to be able to make out every
little crag and rock formation and mesh shading takes this idea and applies it
to computer graphics specialized shaders first figure out which objects even need
to be rendered at all then every object that makes the cut is assigned a certain
level of detail close by objects are rendered at high detail levels with more
triangles with objects that are farther away getting lower levels of detail and
fewer triangles often several orders of magnitude fewer depending on how far
away it is with the level of detail getting adjusted dynamically as objects
move closer or farther away although assigning objects different levels of
detail is a technique that's been around for a while mesh shading allows your GPU
to process triangles in chunks instead of individually allowing level of detail
computations to happen far more quickly next up let's talk about sampler
feedback this is a method that allows more static parts of an image
to be shaded from scratch less frequently meaning that your GPU will
take shading data from previous frames and apply it to subsequent frames
without having to reprocess everything what a ways to work so instead of having
to do tons of work on every object every frame an object might only be reshaded
every second third or even tenth frame depending on the environment a related
feature called variable rate shading only applies detailed shading to parts
of the screen that you're actively looking at with your eyes as your eyes
peripheral vision starts to blur quickly from the center of your field of view
and you can learn much more about variable rate shading in our dedicated
video right up here so all this means that
directx 12 ultimate is primarily concerned with stopping your GPU from
wasting energy rendering crap that you simply won't see freeing up
computational power that could be used to create more realistic game worlds and
not only will we see it on pc but it'll be supported on the xbox series x too so
hopefully we'll see developers leverage it in lots of upcoming titles after all
why would you want to make your GPU do unnecessary work like some kind of power
hungry boss i know how that is
this video is brought to you by storyblocks if you've ever been in the need for a quick video clip for b-roll
after effects templates or motion backgrounds check out story blocks we've
used them here on techwiki and it's really simplified our workflow clips are
easy to find you can download as many as you want at a low cost so you can just
test them in your project whether it's a youtube video or a video background for
your website instead of letting your creative needs take a back seat due to
budget constraints or scrambling because a client made last minute changes use
storyblocks affordable high quality footage instead of finding someone to go
shoot it for you you can check out storyblocks today in the link below so
thanks for watching guys if you like this video give us a thumbs up hit subscribe and be sure to leave a message
in the comment section with your suggestion for topics that we should
cover in the future