What is Direct X 12 and is it a big deal?

With the show case of mantle this past year the death of direct x seemed very close but as we all know Microsoft does not take very well to any of it's product's dying. Pc gaming has brought windows to the forefront of being the most used platform in the gaming world and in response to mantle Direct x 12 was Show cased to the public today in hopes to fight of the rumors of it's death. So what is Direct x 12 and what can it do for you? “With DirectX12, you're looking at reduced overhead for state changes; Efficient reuse of rendering commands. Multithreaded scalability. Flexibile and efficient resource blinding model; App-controlled graphics memory heaps; Amortizing create/destroy costs; Ultra-low cost re-allocates; Free threaded resource and heap management; Access to swizzled resources; Compressed resources (Jpeg, ASTC-LDR) in hardware; The lower-level API also allows the app to track GPU pipeline status, control resource state transitions, and control resource renaming. “Well that seems all good but is it easy to code for then direct x 11 was for pc gaming as a whole,when we look back on poorly coded games a few spring to mind from direct x 9 to 11 and gta 4 was one of the worst yet and even today it show's it's poor coding on the highest end gpu's with still in the 30's with fps.

Another good benefit to Direct x 12 is mobile gaming on windows phone which will have direct x 12 build into the mobile os . Microsoft is working with Qualcomm to improve power efficiency and performance on mobile hardware.

Here we see 3dmark with direct x 11 vs direct x 12 and from what i can see direct x 12 has less layers and more direct access to the game engine giving a huge performance gain.As you can see thread zero has 4 layers it must use which can cause performance loss overall but direct x 12 has 2 layers making the render time and gpu power giving to the engine and game bigger and faster.

Another showcase we saw today was a game we all know to be on console only since xbox day's Forza Motor sport’s, now this demo was showing running on direct x 12 on the pc which a port could be coming soon in 2015 holiday times which in my opinion is very exciting.

When can you get it?Not for a while it seems as it's in alpha stages but Microsoft did say we can expect it holiday 2015 in games. However, Microsoft did not commit to Windows 7 support. In fact, with a launch date of 2015, there's a good chance Microsoft is targeting Direct X 12 for the rumoured release of "Windows 9.