Compatible GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel

Every time Microsoft released a new version of DirectX, PC video game developers turned their heads, it was to go back to square one in terms of learning due to the fact that many functions were replaced by new ones. Other and in terms of hardware The same thing happens and the development of new technologies in the hardware goes hand in hand with the development of the API so that the applications can use them.

As a result, a lot of the technology in DirectX 12 Ultimate cannot be used in the majority of GPUs on the market, only the newer ones at the time of writing. So if you are planning to buy a gaming PC and are thinking about a graphics card, you should keep in mind that if you make a bad choice when choosing graphics hardware for your brand new computer, you can. aging like milk and what interests us is that it does it like wine.

DirectX 12 Ultimate Technologies

In DirectX 12 Ultimate, new technologies have been added, so we thought to list them one by one so you can see the benefits of adopting the new API for video games. However, it should be noted that this is a quick summary of them, so you will find more complete information in the various articles that we have done here in HardZone.

• Laser trace: Ray tracing is one of the greatest graphic advancements, as it solves visual issues with indirect lighting, as well as the nature of light on objects. For convenience, this means sharper shadows and real reflections on objects.
• Mesh shaders: games have increasingly more and more complex geometry thanks to the greater number of details, which means that the stages of the 3D pipeline responsible for managing it became obsolete and a renovation was necessary.
• Direct storage: technology that serves to integrate and access NVMe SSDs from the graphics card, which opens up new scenarios in which the size of VRAM is virtually unlimited.
• Sampler comments: a technology that allows the GPU to choose the exact data it needs from the SSD instead of taking entire blocks of data where much of it only ends up taking up space in the VRAM.
• Variable rate shading: designed so that the GPU does not perform the same operation multiple times with fully symmetrical pixels. With resolutions of millions of pixels per frame, the result is savings and increased performance by eliminating redundant operations.

All of these technologies require profound modifications to the internal GPU hardware, which limits the number of GPUs that fully support all of these technologies.

Why don’t standard DirectX 12 cards support the Ultimate version?

The fact that Microsoft has not baptized the new version of its API as DirectX 13 gives us the clue that the new API is an extension of DirectX 12. This does not mean that all GPUs on the market that support DX12 can run. the games designed. for said API, because there is the exception of not having support for the technologies we mentioned in the previous section. So if they are an essential requirement in a game, it will no longer be possible to run it, even if it has enough power to do so.

Why is this happening? Well, for the fact that these require the addition of additional hardware within the GPU to be able to be implemented. For example, Ray Tracing requires intersection compute units in GPU shader units, DirectStorage requires new memory controller, Variable Rate Shading new raster and ROPS units, what’s more, even Mesh Shaders require modifications of processor control from the GPU itself.

This means that a simple driver is not enough to implement these technologies, nor can they be accessed using shader programs, which means purchasing new hardware.

Which NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel graphics cards support DirectX 12 Ultimate?

In terms of DirectX 12 Ultimate support, NVIDIA GPUs currently have a huge advantage, since all of the technologies implemented in the new API had already been implemented in their RTX 2000 series and obviously inherited from the RTX 3000. That’s from plus the benchmark architecture that Microsoft used to model DirectX 12 Ultimate was NVIDIA’s Turing which was used in the first RTX.

The case of AMD on the other hand is particular, the fiasco of their AMD Vega made them return to the design table to create the RDNA architecture, launched under the name of RX 5000, but architecture despite the competition face to face with the RTX 2000 on the market. it started to be conceived as a response to the GTX 1000 with huge delays. The results ? The RX 5000 does not support DirectX 12 Ultimate technologies while the RX 6000 does, as RDNA 2 has been updated to have full hardware support.

As for Intel, we will have to wait for the release of its Intel ARC to have full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate.

The influence of video game consoles

Today, making high-caliber video games is extremely expensive, which involves significant budgets that a single platform cannot afford on its own. So, developers create versions of their games for various platforms and today they have it easier than ever for two reasons:

• Today’s consoles have PC hardware, long gone are the days of systems with exotic architecture with a great learning curve.
• One of the platforms, Xbox, also uses DirectX 12 Ultimate and therefore the same PC API.

The current situation is that we find ourselves playing intergenerational games on consoles that do not take advantage of the features of DirectX 12 Ultimate. So betting on one graphics card or another will depend on what you want to play and whether you intend to update it in the short or long term. Our advice is not to suffer from myopia and to choose an RTX 3000 from NVIDIA, an ARC from Intel or an RX 6000 from AMD, because little by little, but constantly, the games end up supporting the new technologies implemented in the API.