Microsoft Shows Off Full Power Of DirectX 12 With Square Enix Demo
We've known for a while that DirectX 12 is on its way along with Windows 10, and today's demo of the new API at Microsoft's Build 2015 showed more of it. But with some help from Square Enix and Nvidia, today's demo showed DirectX 12 at its best.
The demo from Square Enix was called "WITCH CHAPTER 0 [cry]." To show off the full power of DirectX 12, Microsoft spared no expense with a PC from Digital Storm sporting four of Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan X GPUs in a quad-SLI setup.
The demo, shown by Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft's corporate vice president in the Developer and Platform Evangelism group, featured a crumbling landscape and a woman crying amongst the ruins of the building. Then the details about the demo, which was running in real-time and in-engine, were revealed: Each scene consisted of 63 million polygons per scene, which Guggenheimer said was 6-12 times the capacity of polygons in DirectX 11. The textures were displayed in an 8K x 8K resolution, and each strand of hair on the main character is an individually rendered polygon that was processed through 50 shaders for better detail and clarity.
Unless you have a few thousand dollars lying around, a quad-SLI setup with four Titan Xs is nothing but a dream. However, this demo shows that the quality of games on a PC, compared to today's consoles, will be vastly superior with DirectX 12. The era of 4K gaming is just beginning, and this demo is a clear indication that DirectX 12 will give developers more tools to create some of the most beautiful and realistic games to date.
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Rexly Peñaflorida is a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware covering topics such as computer hardware, video games, and general technology news.
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getochkn I've seen demos like that for probably 10 years on how awesome some new engine or this or that is, but it never really seems to translate down.Reply -
jimmysmitty Reply15779447 said:I've seen demos like that for probably 10 years on how awesome some new engine or this or that is, but it never really seems to translate down.
Most demos are pre-rendered tough. Doing it in real time and in-engine is quite different and actually impressive TBH.
The biggest thing to take from this is that DX12 will probably allow the same GPU to be more fully utilized in a better way, i.e. it will be able to spit out more polygons which are one of the biggest blocks of more realistic graphics. -
David Dewis The thing im most looking forward too, is the fact that DX12 allows SLI and Xfire GPU setups to use all the onboard VRAM. So essentially this rig was running with 48GB of Vram. FORTY EIGHT! No wonder textures weren't an issue. lolReply -
AldoGG So, we will need 24TFlops and 48GB of VRam for gaming at 8K. probably it will take at least 4 years to be mainstreamReply -
PaulBags Real time photorealistic rendering on prosumer hardware? The NSA must be wetting themselves, that's some spy level stuff right there.Reply -
soldier44 Will be at least 2 years before we see actual games take advantage of DX12. 2017 time frame.Reply -
Somasonic As the articles points out, how many of us can afford quad SLI Titan X's? Impressive, but out of most people's reach at this point in time.Reply -
clonazepam There's no way games could ever, ever look that good and be profitable. That's taking into account that it feels like a fully fleshed out game, labor hours, and still trying to hit the standard price points.... or maybe $120 video games could become the norm. /shrugReply
Edit: and same dumb AI from 1999 (God I hope not though, not dx12's problem)