Nvidia and Microsoft have today unveiled the new version of their API for developers games DirectX 12, that will take the name of DirectX 12 Ultimate. With this launch, both companies are looking to consolidate DirectX as the industry standard, and to give native support to the technology of ‘ray tracing’.
For Marcus Wassmer, director of engineering at Epic Games, this new API is the “new great standard for the next generation of games”. Chris Larson (Hi-Rez Studios), for its part, claims that this launch
“It will accelerate the adoption of the latest-generation graphics in games because the development platforms will not be fragmented”.
But… what is the ‘ray tracing’?
Two years ago, with the launch of their graphics cards RTX, Nvidia introduced the ‘ray tracing’, which allows lighting to more realistic scenes modeled in 3D: the result in regards to shadows and reflections is spectacular, but its consumption of resources of the computers also came to be remarkable.
DirectX 12 Ultimate will now not only using the ‘ray tracing’ in the video game for PC, but that the use of this technology to be more efficient both in the PC and in the Xbox Series X, whose GPU is optimized to do this.
Will also, as is logical, the cards RTX (including those already released to the market), but even its rival AMD will have on the market in a few months graphics ready to work with DirectX 12 Ultimate.
Nvidia and Microsoft have announced, also, that in short it will make public the launch of 30 games that already incorporate this technology. So that we can make us to the idea of what this represents for the photorealism of video games, as presented at the end of last year a demo of Minecraft that applies this technology.
And even in a game as little inclined to realism like this, the comparison of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the ray tracing makes clear the potential of this technology (even Quake II looks like another video game different!):
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it was originally published in
Engadget
by
Marcos Merino
.
