Microsoft unveiled the next revision to DirectX. Say hello to DirectX 11.2, coming to Windows 8.1 PCs and the Xbox One console later this year.
DirectX 11.2 is the next major update to DirectX, bumping the AI version up by 0.1 (currently is at DX11.1). But relax, it does more than just bump up a number. DX11.2 brings a major new feature titled ‘Tiled Resources’, that allows developers to be able to dynamically place high-resolution textures in a scene, all without placing much extra load on the GPU. The new technology works to make sure that the textures don’t appear blurry when seen at close up.
“We continue to innovate DirectX to make Windows the best gaming platform out there,” claims Microsoft vice president of Windows Antoine Leblond. At the company’s Build conference in San Franciso, Microsoft have been showing off the power of DirectX 11.2 and how its new abilities can create “unprecedented amounts of detail.”
In addition to that, DX11.2 brings reduced latencies for apps running atop the API, allowing for “faster UI response”. To get an in-depth review of all the new features that comes along with the new API, head over to Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 feature guide page.
HSL shader linking. W8.1 store apps can compile shaders in runtime, so the behavior of the shaders can be dynamic. However compiling is slow, so this feature allows you to pre-compile shaders at build time and link them at runtime, this way you can create new dynamic shaders without the performance hit. Dynamics shaders could be used for instance for a game to test the performance of the device it’s going to run and modify to a simpler or a more complex version of the shader to maintain the best visual quality while maintaining the target framerate. It’s also useful for building shader library dlls that can be shared among different projects and each app decides how to build their shaders from this library.
Here’s a video detailing ’tiled resources’:
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