Square Enix DirectX 12 Tech Demo “Witch” Showcases Massive Leap in Polygon Rendering

Microsoft continues to hype up the power of its next big graphics API DirectX 12. At the Build 2015 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft technical fellow John Shewchuk showcased a Square Enix tech demo called “WITCH – Chapter 0 [cry]” running on DirectX 12. Of course, many will recognize this as Agni’s Philosophy which ran on DirectX 11 not too long ago. Check out the video above.

The demo was running on a quad-SLI Nvidia GeForce Titan X PC set-up. Shewchuk stated that, “The thing that’s really incredible about what you’re seeing is just the density of data that’s involved in this.” Each scene rendered 63 million polygons in real-time, which is “about six to 12 times more than we could do with DX11,” and the demo shows the camera moving in real-time to illustrate that it is not in fact pre-rendered CG.

The textures were 8K by 8K in resolution and “every piece of hair is being rendered as a polygon – this isn’t surface map stuff. I think it’s an incredible example of just how far people are pushing big data.”

DirectX 12 will ship with Windows 10 which is expected to be out this Summer. Stay tuned for more details.