- Directx 12 update drivers#
- Directx 12 update software#
- Directx 12 update series#
- Directx 12 update windows#
Bottom level acceleration structures (BLAS, for short) contain data about the primitives - the shapes that are used to build up the environment. DXR sets out the overall rules behind these structures, splitting them into two types: bottom level and top level. There are various techniques, called acceleration structures, that can be employed to help speed up the process of following the rays through the scene. Ray tracing is hard work, even in simple games like Minecraft. That's no small amount of work to handle, so anything that can be done to help out becomes compulsory, rather than optional. With today's hardware, doing this for one ray isn't super difficult, but for it to produce realistic results, each pixel in the frame needs at least one ray to be cast out and traced.Īnd if the frame has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, that would result in a little over 2 million rays. passes through, but at an angle), and so the process can continue to follow the ray, as it ricochets around the scene. The ray might be reflected, absorbed, or refracted (i.e. Then, based on the information about that surface, the color and intensity of the light is calculated. Ray tracing works by following the path of a light ray, and seeing what objects it interacts with. But it's always been somewhat of a trick - an estimation of how light actually interacts with surfaces. We've covered the difference between ray tracing and traditional rasterization before, so we'll focus specifically on what DXR is doing.įor decades, 3D games have been using a variety of techniques to simulate how the color and brightness of an object will appear, based on the impact of light sources and shadows. Nvidia's Turing architecture sported the first ray tracing hardware in a desktop GPU
Directx 12 update series#
That changed with the launch of Turing-powered GeForce RTX graphics cards in September 2018, and Nvidia's marketing team heavily promoted RTX as being the next step in the evolution of graphics.ĪMD followed suit in November 2020 with the launch of their RDNA 2 architecture, as used in Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards, the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles. Nvidia was the first to offer hardware support for it, with their Volta-based GPUs, even though these chips didn't have any specific features to handle ray tracing. DirectX Raytracing first appeared in late 2018 and has been created in conjunction with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.
Directx 12 update software#
The first addition to the DirectX 12 collective was a software structure for ray tracing, The 'holy grail' of graphics and something that's been a near constant source of wonder and criticism, in equal measure.ĭXR a.k.a. But as mentioned before, it's kept receiving additions.
Directx 12 update windows#
Microsoft has continually updated this massive library over the past 25 years, and the latest version called DirectX 12, was released to the public in late July 2015, with the launch of Windows 10.
Directx 12 update drivers#
The drivers for the devices that generate or use these multimedia functions will translate the instructions from the API, turning them into sequences of code that the hardware understands. Think of these as an enormous collection of books, in which all kinds of rules and structures are set out about how about to issue instructions and what data types to use, as well as offering simplified commands that can be used in place of long sequences of code.Ī small selection of the mountain of files that make up DirectXĭirectX provides APIs for graphics, sound, video, music, and input devices - pretty much everything you're going to need to play a game on a PC. So to make the process of making a game easier, Microsoft created a set of low-level APIs back in 1995. All of the graphics, sound, gameplay mechanics are in the thousands or million of lines of instructions - take this data, multiply it with that data, put the result here, and so on.īut much of this work will be common, no matter what the game is or what platform it gets played on. Take any modern game, be it one of the latest blockbusters or a tiny indie offering, and you'll find that it's been coded in a general purpose language, such as C++. Let's start with a quick explanation of what is DirectX. So what exactly are they? What can these enhancements do and how will they make games better for us all?Īll good questions and we've got you covered: read on to find out! What exactly is DirectX 12? The latest version, DX12 was released in 2015 but in the past couple of years, Microsoft have been expanding the software library to cover ray tracing and machine learning, and eventually, data management.īig next-gen titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs: Legion are using some of these DirectX 12 extras. DirectX has been with us for 25 years, providing developers with the tools to make incredible games.
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