Reasons of the slower adoption are numerous – it’s harder to develop games using DX12 or Vulkan (if you’re really pushing optimization boat out), older hardware typically performed better with DX11 (although this is starting to change, as people are upgrading their machines naturally) and drivers and SDK’s were immature (and this is another area that’s rapidly evolving). But this hasn’t been the case, and games such Resident Evil 7, Final Fantasy 15 and even Black Ops 4 are all firmly stuck on DX11. It was easy to assume that the vast majority of PC games would be DX12 or Vulkan by now, and DX11 would be relegated to smaller indie studios or games which didn’t push the visual envelope. The titles such as Metro Exodus look incredible, and Nvidia are currently perfecting Adaptive Temporal Antialiasing, a sure sign of the future of graphics. DirectX 12 and Vulkan allowed much gave games the ability to run over more threads, allowing the GPU to be better fed with data, and furthermore gave developers much better control over GPU resources.Īnd as I’m writing this, Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft (and about everyone else in the industry) are waxing lyrically about the benefits of RayTracing – and DXR (DirectX RayTracing) is yet another extension of how the industry will evolve, pushing the graphical envelope of future games even more. It was very easy to see the very impressive Witch Demo and have open mouths, drooling at what was to come. We here at RedGamingTech, extensively covered Vulkan, DX12 and Mantle during their initial announcements (we actually have a few exclusive interviews with AMD’s Robert Hallock regarding Vulkan, linked in the description if you’d like to check them out).