Microsoft has announced that DirectX 11.2 is exclusive to the company’s upcoming Xbox One console and their Windows 8.1 operating system.
DirectX 11.2 is the company’s next-generation version of its application programming interface (API) and hardware abstraction layer (HAL).
The announcement came at the BUILD conference this week, where Microsoft’s Antoine Leblond showcased the new version and its features.
DirectX 11.2 is designed to allow a game to harness both system RAM and graphics RAM in order to store textures and game assets. The version’s new Tiled Resources feature is said to “vastly improve” the resolution of textures displayed in-game.
During the demonstration, Leblond used 9GB of texture data with the majority being held by the system RAM and not the graphics RAM.
Leblond confirmed that Direct3D 11.2 will be the first version of the API to support Tiled Resources.
Source: Bit-Tech
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I find that the problem with Windows 8 is that it’s unfamiliar. For at least 90% of PC users, it’s a productivity killer.
Add a product like StartIsBack (US$3 per PC) and Windows 8 is actually a very good OS. It runs well on less-capable hardware, starts and stops faster than Windows 7 and is generally a nice incremental improvement over Windows 7.
PC retailers, OEMs and VARs should start bundling new PCs and retail Windows 8 with add-on Start Button/Start Menu software and the complaints about Windows 8 will evaporate.
I think that Microsoft has missed the mark with their tablet-centered OS for the vast majority of their existing desktop/laptop Windows users and stubbornly refusing to put back the one feature that will make it work for anyone familiar with Windows since 1995 is going to cause Windows 8 to make the list of Microsoft failures.
The other Big Issue with Windows 8 is that there’s no way to upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows XP. A decent Upgrade Tool will make it much more attractive for businesses and individuals currently using XP to make the jump to Windows 8.