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Ten Years of D3D12

For those of us that have been using it from the start, it can be hard to believe that Direct3D 12 has been around for ten years now. Windows 10 was released on July 29th 2015, and D3D12 has been with us ever since. While it’s true that this is the longest we’ve gone between major D3D version updates, it’s also not fair to say that the API has remained static.

DXGI_FORMAT_R9G9B9E5_SHAREDEXP is an interesting format: it’s similar to R11G11B10_FLOAT in that it allows for storing positive floating point RGB values with 4 bytes per texel, and provides the same effective range as fp10/fp11/fp16 by virtue of having same number (5) of exponent bits. ExecuteIndirect is flexible enough to let you do this yourself by setting a root constant for each draw as part of your command signature, but it turns out that this requires some rather fancy footwork from drivers to make this run as expected. Representing every visibility change as a transition gave some programmers the wrong mental model of what GPUs were actually doing under the hood, and in other cases the drivers were forced to insert excess flushes to ensure safety.

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