Abisha, on 02 July 2015 - 12:54 PM, said:
I hear that lie before with DX10 (i see no improvement over DX9 and DX11.. really are their even games released using it?.
they can promise golden mountain
but the final decision is with the Game developers to use DX12 and guess what. they not gonna use it when most of their potential customers using Direct X 9.
know what they say? Many give little promise does a crazy joy in life.
The improvements between DirectX10 and 11 are actually more substantive (in my opinion) than those between 9 and 10.
The biggest change between 9 and 10 is the -concept- of graphics hardware. DX9 hardware was broken up into various pipelines to handle different types of instructions. Direct X 10 and Open GL 2 (if I remember correctly) changed that with compliant hardware running what was known as a "unified shader."
This, basically, turned all of the processing pipelines into the same structure (with some architectural differences between manufacturers) and used firmware/software drivers to perform various calculations. This led to massive changes in how things like particles and geometry were processed.
For example - I recall DX10 demos at the time running to simulate smoke and other particle behavior dynamically (IE - the particles actually move randomly and are entirely rendered by the GPU). This also allowed for some other things like more interesting water effects and some better lens effects.
DX11 brought DX compute and integrated a number of increased transformation functions. Since it is, for the most part, a software/driver upgrade for the unified shader architecture - it's more a refinement of DX 10 in my opinion.
DX12 throws all of that out the window. DX12 is based heavily upon AMD's Mantle - which was intended to be a very inclusive API built in the vein of Open CL with both unified graphics and stream computing functions (such as physics simulations, simulations of neural networks, etc) that would run at the hardware level with minimal driver fluff.
Basically - what you are programming in Direct X 12 is not references to abstract shader libraries that are then sorted through by the driver. You are programming instructions for the hardware that will be compiled and loaded into the hardware very directly. It's all designed to be very low level and to 'spread' across the available hardware efficiently.
It's not just a gold mountain that has been promised - it's a gold mountain that has largely been delivered.
As for DX9 - the main reason it has been hanging around is because there are still quite a few Windows XP machines floating around and because of the console market that was dominated by DX8/9-ish hardware. The move to 11 has been much quicker and is carrying more momentum than there ever was behind 10 several years ago (... holy crap, has it been that long, already?). And 12 is basically a new Direct X paradigm.
Which is very similar to what Vulkan is - it is the next generation of Open GL - and it is moving in the same direction. It's a low-level API built to integrate graphics and Open CL into one concept with plans to make it function with C++ instructions.