DirectX 12 Ultimate brings Xbox Series X features to PC gaming

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  DirectX ray tracing became available in early 2018. DX12 Ultimate brings new features that weren't available in DXR1.0. [credit: Nvidia ]

Today, Microsoft is announcing a new version of its gaming and multimedia API platform, DirectX. The new version, DirectX 12 Ultimate, largely unifies Windows PCs with the upcoming Xbox Series X platform, offering the platform's new precision rendering features to Windows gamers with supporting video cards.

Many of the new features have more to do with the software side of development than the hardware. The new DirectX 12 Ultimate API calls aren't just enabling access to new hardware features, they're offering deeper, lower-level, and potentially more efficient access to hardware features and resources that are already present.

For now, the new features are slated largely for Nvidia cards only, with "full support on GeForce RTX"-the presentation you're seeing slides from actually came from Nvidia itself, not Microsoft. Meanwhile, AMD has announced that its upcoming slate of RDNA 2 GPUs will have "full support" for the DirectX 12 Ultimate API-but not any prior generations of AMD cards. (AMD takes the opportunity to remind gamers that the same RDNA 2 architecture is powering both Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's PlayStation 5 consoles.)

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