Hi,
As it seems, Microsoft prepared an answer to AMD's mantle:
DX12

It reduces lot's of overhead(up to 50%) compared to DX11

The nice thing is: it is compatible and runs with DX11 Hardware.
Which means, that an NVidia 400 is capable of running it.

So i thought, instead of wishes for a DX11 implementation, how about going for DX12?

Didn't they say they'll implement the newest available dx?

Presumably we will only get DX12 if it will be supported on Windows 7. Take a look here. And since even DX11.1 and 11.2 are not really supported on Win7, I'm in doubt about that.

Yes i know, it's not yet confirmed for Windows7, but with companies like EA behind this idea, there is a chance for it.

EDIT: and as far as i know, mantle runs on WIn7, too. and DX12 is the MS answer to Mantle. SHame on them if they expect anything with a Win8 only release

and the winner is going to be a laughing 3rd one called OpenGL
but OpenGL would need a huge marketing boost, maybe as large as DX has by Microsoft, because its technology is not worse at all, frequently more advanced.

I would also like to see Gamestudio running with OpenGL. This would allow more flexibility to the user and providing some more advanced techniques like texture arrays or bindless textures to get a huge performance boost.

Actually DirectX is lots of fun with a really great API, good documentation and some totally awesome tools. Also DirectX 11 already has some great features (I think there is something like texture arrays as well?) and I have no doubt that DirectX 12 will improve on it even further.

The biggest advantage of OpenGL is that it works on so many different platforms and maybe its extension system, which on the other hand results on many different rendering parts for different hardware if you want to take advantage of the latest features or just get the best performance on all kind of hardware and that gets very ugly very fast.


With Valve pushing Linux and NVIDIA pushing the bindless extensions, OpenGL is currently getting lots of attention. Also with the mobile market mostly based on OpenGL ES, there seem to be more people interested in using OpenGL than ever.
Did you see those presentations claiming a 5x to 15x performance improvements if you are CPU bound by the graphics driver? There now finally is a reference GLSL compiler and Valve is working on an open source OpenGL debugger for linux.

texture arrays were introduced with dx10 due to some tutorials I read, and I would need them so much... what I don't know how long dx9 will be supported, which is related to making long run projects with 3dgs (as a hobbyist I need multiple time period than a full time developer).