HN Reader

Really appreciate the detailed article! I was on the team that shipped D3D11 and helped with the start of D3D12. I went off to other things and lost touch - the API has come a long way! So many of these features were just little whispers of ideas exchanged in the hallways. So cool to see them come to life!

Me, a tabletop RPG gamer and board gamer who hasn't played computer games in years (literally more than a decade): "Huh, that's interesting. Why are they rolling a 12-sided die between 1 and 3 times, choosing how many times it will be rolled by rolling a 6-sided die and dividing the number in half rounded up?"

Because before I clicked on the article (or the comments), that's the only sense I could make of the expression "d3d12" — rolling a d12, d3 times.

> Or at least, you can do that if you still care about MSAA. :)

I am a huge fan of all traditional forms of supersampling, intra-frame-only anti-aliasing techniques. The performance cost begins to make sense when you realize that these techniques are essentially perfect for the general case. They actually increase the information content of each pixel within each frame. Many modern techniques rely on multiple consecutive frames to build a final result. This is tantamount to game dev quackery in my book.

SSAA is even better than MSAA and is effectively what you are using in any game where you can set the "render scale" to a figure above 100%. It doesn't necessarily need to come in big scary powers of two (it used to and made enablement a problem). Even small oversampling rates like 110-130% can make a meaningful difference in my experience. If you can afford to go to 200% scale, you will receive a 4x increase in information content per pixel.

One of the features that was hyped about DirectX 12 was that it had explicit support for multiple GPU's even if they were different models from different manufacturers.

As far as I know very few, if any, games currently take advantage of this feature. It's somewhat interesting that this is the case, when you think of it many PC's and laptops do have 2 GPU's, one as a Discrete Graphics card, and the other that comes integrated with the CPU itself (and over the last few year's these integrated GPU's have become powerful enough themselves to run some demanding games at low or medium settings at 60 fps)

It should have been Vulkan from the start instead of another NIH.

The future is Vulkan, not DirectX