- Microsoft released the latest DirectX Ultimate technology in May and it announced a huge step in computer graphics.
- Now, the software giant revealed more details about DirectX feature level 12_2 and which cards will support this new technology.
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Microsoft released the latest DirectX 12 Ultimate technology a few months ago and it announced a huge step in computer graphics.
Now, Microsoft revealed a little bit more details about DirectX feature level 12_2 and which cards will support this new technology.
If we lost you on the feature level moniker, let’s clear it out. A feature level for DirectX specifies exactly which capabilities can be handled by a certain GPU.
Advancing from 12_0 to 12_1 and 12_2, a graphics card would have more advanced features and the latest DirectX 12_2 feature level was defined as DirectX 12 Ultimate.
Which cards will support DirectX 12_2?
This is the actual novelty from Microsoft’s announcement so we will quote it exactly as it appears on their website:
- Feature level 12_2 is supported on NVIDIA GeForce RTX and NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs.
- AMD’s upcoming RDNA 2 architecture-based GPUs will include full feature level 12_2 support.
- Intel’s roadmap includes discrete GPUs that will empower developers to take full advantage of Feature Level 12_2.
- Microsoft is collaborating with Qualcomm to bring the benefits of DirectX feature level 12_2 to Snapdragon platforms.
What are the features of DirectX 12_2 graphics cards?
Just to be extremely clear, Microsoft also presented the set of features that a DirectX feature level 12_2 card will have:
| Feature | 12_2 minimum | Public spec |
| Required driver model | WDDM 2.0 | |
| Shader Model | 6.5 | Link |
| Raytracing tier | Tier 1.1 | Link |
| Variable shading rate | Tier 2 | Link |
| Mesh shader tier | Tier 1 | Link |
| Sampler feedback | Tier 0.9 | Link |
| Resource Binding Tier | Tier 3 | Link |
| Tiled Resources | Tier 3 | |
| Conservative Rasterization | Tier 3 | Link |
| Root Signature Tier | 1.1 | Link |
| DepthBoundsTestSupported | TRUE | Link |
| WriteBufferImmediateSupportFlags | Direct, Compute, Bundle | |
| MaxGPUVirtualAddressBitsPerResource | 40 | |
| MaxGPUVirtualAddressBitsPerProcess | 40 |
A DirectX 12 Ultimate will also have the following flags set:
| Feature | 12_2 value |
| WaveOps | TRUE |
| OutputMergerLogicOp | TRUE |
| VPAndRTArrayIndexFromAnyShaderFeedingRasterizerSupportWithoutGSEmulation | TRUE |
| CopyQueueTimestampQueriesSupported | TRUE |
| CastingFullyTypedFormatSupported | TRUE |
| Int64ShaderOps | TRUE |
Just to remind you of the major improvements for the new DirectX 12 Ultimate, they are Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shaders, and Sampler Feedback.
What do you think about the new features and advancements? Drop us a line in the Comments section below.
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