Both AMD and NVIIDA have already committed to supporting DirectX 12 (and by extension WDDM 2.0) on GCN 1.0 and later and Fermi and later respectively, so while we can’t test these products today, they should be working by the time DirectX 12 ships.Īlso absent for the moment is a definition for DirectX 12’s Feature Level 12_0 and DirectX 11’s 11_3. Meanwhile in NVIDIA’s case, as is common for NVIDIA beta drivers they only ship with support enabled for their newer GPUs – Kepler, Maxwell 1, and Maxwell 2 – with Fermi support disabled.
In AMD’s case GCN 1.0 cards are supported under their WDDM 2.0 driver, but we are encountering texturing issues in Star Swarm that do not occur with GCN 1.1 and later. In short, among AMD and NVIDIA their latest products are up and running in WDDM 2.0, but not on all of their earlier products. These drivers are still a work in progress, and as a result not all hardware support is enabled and not all bugs have been worked out. The overhauling of WDDM for 2.0 means that graphics drivers are impacted as well as the OS, and like Microsoft, NVIDIA and AMD have been preparing for WDDM 2.0 with updated graphics drivers. WDDM 2.0 is also responsible for some of the baser CPU efficiency optimizations in DX12, such as changes to how memory residency is handled and how DX12 applications can more explicitly control residence. Among the features tied to WDDM 2.0 are DX12’s explicit memory management and dynamic resource indexing, both of which wouldn’t have been nearly as performant under WDDM 1.3. Microsoft has not released too many details on WDDM 2.0 so far – more information will be released around GDC 2015 – but WDDM 2.0 is based around enabling DirectX 12, adding the necessary features to the kernel and display drivers in order to support the API above it.
In fact WDDM 2.0 is the biggest change to WDDM since the driver model was introduced in Windows Vista, and as a result DirectX 12 itself represents a very large overhaul of the Windows GPU ecosystem. Like Microsoft’s last couple of DirectX 11 minor version upgrades, DirectX 12 goes hand-in-hand with a new version of the Windows Display Driver Model, WDDM 2.0. But as of now everything is far enough along that we can finally get a reasonable look at what DirectX 12 is capable of.įrom a technical perspective the DirectX 12 API is just one part of a bigger picture. There are still bugs, and performance and compatibility is subject to change. As a result today’s preview should be taken as just that: an early preview. Windows 10 itself is still feature-incomplete, so what we’re looking at here today doesn’t even qualify as beta software. The Current State of DirectX 12 & WDDM 2.0Īlthough DirectX 12 is up and running in the latest public release of Windows 10, it and many of its related components are still under development.
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