A new era of PC gaming is almost upon us- as more and more games begin to use DirectX 12 (and its non Microsoft counterpart, Vulkan), we will see the benefits that these new generation APIs can net our games on PC. However, DirectX 12 is, at least according to the admission of one developer, while powerful, ‘fairly complicated.’ In the ordinary course of time, it could take time before we actually started seeing games utilize it meaningfully.
However, thanks to the efforts of AMD and Nvidia both, it looks like we won’t have to wait that long. Both will be holding panels at GDC, where they will be discussing new toolkits that they will be putting out, to enable the transition to the new APIs easily.
Nvidia’s is titled Raise your Game with NVIDIA GeForce Tools, and it “will cover the latest offering of developer tools for DirectX 12 development and VR. Developers will learn how to recognize the new API concepts through demos and walkthroughs, as well as how to profile DirectX 12 with the new Range Profiler.”
AMD’s panel is called Let your game shine – optimizing DirectX 12 and Vulkan performance with AMD CodeXL, and they will “review capabilities, including: capturing and visualizing the timeline of a frame, analyzing multi-threaded host and GPU interaction, pinpointing hotspot API calls, exposing inefficient GPU utilization and much more. In addition, [they]’ll review how to develop and build Vulkan programs containing multiple shaders, and analyze the resource demands of their generated ISA on multiple target platforms without executing them.”
Almost none of that makes any sense to me, but hey, I imagine game developers are suitably excited about the potential of all of these new technologies.
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