While DirectX 12 support hasn’t taken off to the extent that many may have expected it to, PC games still sometimes end up having DirectX 12 forks for Windows 10 users who are interested. The latest game to do that is F1 2018, which just launched a few months ago.

The DirectX 12 version of the game is still technically available in beta (which means it may not run as well as expected; it may not even run as well as the non DirectX 12 branch of the game). Codemasters says that high end PCs should be able to get faster performance with this fork of the game, but others may actually find it being more inefficient.

If you want to access the beta, right click on the game in your library, and select Properties. Go to “Beta”, enter the branch password 244EwzNFQkfnqf4Xc6GTmgsPtT6LAbYn and press “Check Code”. Close the window, and install it, and you should be good to go.

F1 2018 is out now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Via DSO Gaming.

When Microsoft acquired Havok back in October 2015, it seemed like a fairly big move. Havok’s Physics toolset was renowned in the industry and Microsoft’s Direct X API has been pretty much the de facto tool for game development. However, plans for Havok were fairly quiet, until recently.

Microsoft has registered a trademark for Direct Physics, filed in September 2016 and with a status date of January 31st 2017. There are several conclusions one could draw but the most obvious is that Microsoft is using Havok’s technology and further integrating it with Direct X technology.

Such a move wouldn’t be bad, especially given the company’s revitalized desire for gaming on PC courtesy of Windows 10 and the upcoming Project Scorpio that will arrive in Holiday 2017. The kinds of games that will result from the move still need to be seen.

What are your thoughts on Direct Physics? Let us know in the comments and stay tuned for more updates

GameWorks Flow is a brand new upcoming experimental rendering technology by Nvidia, which is supposed to be able to render fluids, and fluid objects and substances, such as fire and smoke, with far more accuracy and realism than is possible by traditional methods. The technology was introduced by NVIDIA last year, though it’s been in beta since. However, ahead of its integration into Unreal Engine 4, NVIDIA has released a brand new video, showcasing the technology implemented in DirectX 12.

The simulation below is in real time (which makes it that much more impressive), and apparently based on an adaptive sparse voxel grid- which, in simple parlance, means that the algorithm at work here can choose to focus on some areas of the simulation more than others, and then change that focus over time as it sees fit (which is particularly helpful for things like fire and smoke, which vary in luminosity and density over time).

You can check out the video below. It’s pretty impressive, and hopefully indicative of things to come.

DirectX 12 and Vulkan are supposed to be the wave of the future for PC gaming- that’s what we’ve been told. But while the two APIs continue to be engaged in a fierce battle for supremacy, uptake on them by most developers has been… slow, to put it bluntly.

So when we had the chance to speak with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock – who you may remember as one of the most vocal proponents of DirectX 12 – we made sure to ask him why developers aren’t using it and Vulkan all that well. According to Wardell, the lack of support right now comes down to the newness of both APIs, and the ensuing lack of documentation on properly exploiting them- but for both of them, widespread adoption is only a matter of time.

“DirectX 12 and Vulkan are certainly total game changers because they allow multiple threads to be talking to GPUs simultaneously,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. DirectX 11, no matter how fancy your engine was, only one of your threads could talk to the graphics engine at a time. And that was better than DX9, where only one fixed thread could talk to an engine at a time.

“But DirectX 12, if I have 8 or 16 cores, and all of them can talk to the engine at once- then that’s a hell of a performance boost. That was actually the reason I got a lot of scepticism about the benchmarks for Ashes of the Singularity, because we came out and said we are seeing a 400% boost in performance on an eight core machine. And when we shipped it, it ended up being even bigger than that. People thought the numbers were crazy, but think about it, they’re not. If in DirectX 11, only one core can talk to the GPU at once, and in DX12, we have eight- your theoretical limit would be eight times a boost. We don’t really get that, but a four times boost is not that crazy then.

Given how game changing these two are, the only reason they are not being supported right now is a lack of documentation, according to Wardell.

“The biggest reason is documentation. With DX11, there’s lots and lots of books out there for it. DX12 needs a lot more documentation before people will pick it up. The other thing is, people are now using off the shelf parts. And so, that can be tricky because if you have multiple threads talking to the graphics adaptor once, you have to be careful how those threads work, you can’t just- if you have two threads talking at once, your apps will crash. It’s actually quite tricky to do it right. And so because of that, it’s just slow going. I can say that Microsoft is doing some pretty exciting stuff on that end- but whether, in the long term, it’s all going to be DX12 and Vulkan, because you can’t just walk away from something like this. Wait until 16 core CPUs are the norm, if you’re using DX11 at that time still, you might be at 1/10th the speed of a DX12 game. That’s impossible to ignore.”

Given that multi-core CPUs are a wave of the future, and something that are only going to get more and more prevalent across all product categories as time goes on, it is only a matter of time before developers have to contend with programming for them. Given that, Wardell may be right- it will only be a matter of time before they are forced to come to terms with either DirectX 12, or Vulkan, or both.

The upcoming Sniper Elite 4 will be supporting Sony’s PS4 Pro console; Rebellion Games confirmed today that the game will sport enhanced graphics on Sony’s new console, including enhanced frame rate, increased draw distances, increased geometry level of detail, improved lighting and shadows fidelity, increased image quality of reflections, and faster loading times.

Sniper Elite 4‘s PC version will also be supporting Microsoft’s new DirectX 12 API, and presumably, it will be getting similar improvements across the board there, too.

“We’ve worked really hard to make Sniper Elite 4 our biggest and best game ever,” said Rebellion CTO and Co-founder Chris Kingsley, “And now the power of PlayStation 4 Pro, and DirectX 12 on PC, means we can take things even further for our fans who want the best sniper experience in the world. We’re turning everything up to 12!”

Sniper Elite 4 will launch on PC, PS4, and Xbox One on February 14. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage on the game.

Adoption of DirectX 12 among the development community has been decidedly slower than what Microsoft would have wanted- so here they are, with another update for their new star API, which makes development using DX12 easier for developers, presumably to spur them into using it while developing games for PC.

Microsoft have now added PIX to Windows 10, which means that developers can now use Microsoft’s debugging and performance tuning tool in analyzing their DirectX 12 games. PIX as a debugging environment is widely praised, so this is a good move on Microsoft’s part regardless.

If you want, you can download PIX for yourself from here. Just remember, it is technically still in open beta. And make sure to keep the following requirements in mind:

• PIX only supports capturing D3D12 content, not D3D11 or 11on12.
• PIX only supports 64-bit apps (both UWP and Win32). PIX does not support x86 apps.
• PIX only captures data from the specific process that it launched or attached to.  It does not support child processes. If your title uses multiple processes, you will need to bypass any client/launcher processes and have PIX launch/attach the main game executable.
• Counter values other than timing in the event list are not currently rolled up to their parent bundle or marker region.
• GPU captures are not generally portable between different GPUs or even different drivers on the same GPU. PIX will warn if you attempt to run analysis on a capture whose capture device differs from the current playback device. You can continue past this warning, but be aware there may be compatibility issues that cause it to fail.
• GPU captures do not currently overlap GPU work on different queues. If your app uses asynchronous compute to execute rendering and compute work simultaneously, it will show up in the timeline as being executed in a non-parallel fashion.
• PIX does not support multi-GPU enabled apps.  You can use it on a machine with multiple GPUs, but PIX will always capture/playback on the primary adapter.
• PIX only supports PCs with DX12 enabled GPU with the latest drivers, 32GB of system RAM and Windows 10 build 14393 (Anniversary Update, aka RS1) with latest updates

You may not necessarily care for it much (I know I certainly do not), but it looks like there is no stopping the impending dominance of Microsoft’s newest OS. Windows 10 is now installed by over 50% of Steam’s users, the results of the latest Steam hardware survey show.

This is the first milestone Windows 10 has hit on Steam since May 2016, when it overtook Windows 7 to become the most used OS on Steam. Right now, 50.35% of all Steam users use Windows 10; almost 34% users are on Windows 7 still, while 10% are using Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Windows XP and Vista collectively are on 1.34%, with the remaining share divided by MacOS and Linux users.

Of course, there is more to this news than just install base numbers, too- see, DirectX 12, Microsoft’s next generation API, is exclusive to Windows 10. This means that it is unlikely to see widespread use and adoption by developers unless there are more Windows 10 users. With Windows 10 making persistent and steady gains, it is now evident that DirectX 12 use (and concurrently, Vulkan use) is more a matter of when, not if.

The newest patch for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s PC version is now out, and it continues that game’s quest to get it running better on Microsoft’s new DirectX 12 API. According to the change log for the update, loading times, stability, and performance have all been improved for the game’s DirectX 12 build.

That’s not all, as the patch seems to perform some general housekeeping as far as the technical aspects of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on PC go at large. You can check out the full list of changes and updates for yourself below. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Patch build 592.1 Changelog:

• Fixed regression that was introduced in last patch: Walking speed is now fixed properly.
• Fixed regression that was introduced in last patch: Talos Rucker no longer spawns twice.
• AMD intro video now has a lower volume.
• Fixed an issue where clicking on some interactive objects, such as computers or keypads, could cause Jensen to unholster his weapon.
• Fixed an issue where some users had to create a new Windows account to be able to start the game.
• Fixed a crash when loading a savegame.
• Fixed an issue where SSAO could introduce some graphical artifacts.
• Fixed an issue in Breach where the Booster Pack open button would not be shown, even though the user had Booster Packs to open.
• Fixed issues with the dialogue selection wheel.

• Improved stability and performance.
• Major improvement to loading times.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided may be a couple of months old, but Eidos Montreal seem to be continuing their quest to make it as technologically impressive as they can. They added DirectX 12 support for the game weeks after its launch- and now, they seem to be testing multi-GPU usage on DirectX 12, too.

In a new update that was released on Friday, Eidos Montreal added an opt-in preview for  the DirectX 12 Multi-GPU build for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. So for those of you who are curious to see how the game would run on your PC, this update is probably for you. Just make sure you’ve updated your drivers before you go mucking around with it.

In addition, there were other things enabled by this update, too. You can find the patch notes below. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

• Players can now also close their in-game menus using the keys to open it: TAB / I / M / O / P / L.
• Fixed an issue where the diagonal walk speed was too fast, causing Jensen to make noise.
• Fixed a crash at the shooting range.
• Fixed an issue where Rucker would not spawn in certain situations.
• Fixed an issue where the tranquilizer rifle would no longer shoot in certain situations.
• Fixed an issue in System Rift where the “Heat Sensor” strategy page would not trigger after loading a savegame.
• ‘Hold E’ to open Mission Objectives/Pocket Secretaries/Strategy Pages/Etc. are mapped to the TAB key by default. This removes the interference with ‘Hold E’ to drag bodies.

As promised, the DirectX 12 update for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is now available for the PC version of the game. The update seems to run very poorly for Nvidia users, however, which seems to be a trend with these DirectX 12 games- in general, it has been found that Nvidia hardware suffers more on DirectX 12 for some reason than AMD.

DSO Gaming tested the DirectX 12 build on Nvidia hardware, and found the hits to performance to be unacceptable- they’re recommending that you stay away from this one for now. That said, the build is at least labeled as a ‘preview’ build, so maybe over time, it can be updated and get better than the frankly horrific state that it is in right now.

The full patch notes for the update follow. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

• Fixed a freeze that happened for some players during the subway loading scene.
• Fix for issue where massive stalls would occur in Prague.
• Fixed issue where players could no longer save when they ran out of Steam Cloud space. (When the player runs out of space, the oldest saves will now be removed from the Steam Cloud. They will NOT be deleted and are still available from disk. They will remain present in your in-game ‘load game’ list.
• Improved shadow behaviour in the distance when Contact Hardening Shadows is turned on.
• Fixed issue where tutorial messages could stay/re-appear on-screen after completing the tutorial.
• Fixed an issue where players could lose input control when hacking certain computers.
• Fixed various UI issues.

As of today, users are also able to utilize the awaited DirectX 12 Graphics API. To activate this you are required to do the following:

• Within your Steam Library, right-click on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
• Select ‘properties’ from the context menu and navigate to the Beta tab.
• From the dropdown menu, select dx12_preview then close the window.

After the game has downloaded the DirectX 12 supported build you can then toggle DirectX 12 from either the launcher window or from the Display options within the game.
Note that DirectX 12 requires a restart of the game if (de-)activated from within a running Deus Ex: Mankind Divided game session.