We’ve gotten a pretty good look at how the Xbox Series X and PS5 hardware will stack up against each other, and now Microsoft and Nvidia have just revealed the new application programming interface (aka API) that will power next-generation games.
Meet DirectX 12 Ultimate, the first universal graphics API designed to work across consoles and PCs. The current generation of consoles, the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, were already so close to being gaming PCs in terms of hardware, and this new API will make development between all the consoles that much easier and faster – and hopefully lead to more console exclusives coming to the PC too.
One of the biggest features DirectX 12 Ultimate brings is standardized ray tracing. DirectX Ray Tracing has been floating around for some time now, but rather than powering one off versions of Minecraft, this new version of DXR promises to support more than 30 released and announced games.
For the longest time we’ve known that both the next-generation consoles would feature ray tracing but we didn’t know what software would be powering it since AMD has yet to introduce a ray tracing platform like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX technology. Now it appears all ray tracing on the Xbox Series X and PS5 will be powered by DirectX 12 Ultimate.
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Since Nvidia co-developed DXR 1.1 with Microsoft, it uses many of the same underlying mesh shader techniques to generate real-time ray traced graphics. The GPU maker also announced DirectX 12 Ultimate games will be fully compatible with its GeForce RTX technology. AMD might not have played a direct hand in developing DXR 1.1, but the company announced its RDNA 2 architecture in both desktop graphics cards and both consoles will be ready to take full advantage of the new API’s ray tracing capabilities.
DirectX 12 Ultimate also incorporates many of the variable rate shading techniques Nvidia introduced with its Turing series of graphics cards. For the uninitiated, variable rate shading is essentially a more intelligent way of rendering detail, so your GPU doesn’t waste unnecessary cycles and power. This way your GPU (or console in this case) can better focus on keeping frame rates up rather than trying to display everything on the screen at its maximum visual fidelity.
There are multiple techniques at play here, including content adaptive shading that basically mattes together similar looking textures, or motion adaptive shading that reduces the level of detail around fast moving objects and scenery.
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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam
Source: IGN.com DirectX 12 Ultimate Promises to Make Cross-Platform Development Easier