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Comment by patrickfl | Hacker News Reader

Not a hardware guy so don't know a ton about this, the oversimplification was a bit necessary for me. With that, I'm very excited for DX12, is it available for download on Windows7-64 yet?

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It's about redesigning the current idiotic graphics pipeline API, so the driver and the application doesn't have to use the inefficient abstractions, that are already outdated on both ends. (The GPU is much more complex and sophisticated than what it used to be. It's not just a fancy framebuffer with a few megabytes of RAM so you can do z-culling and a 3D to 2D projection. And nowadays with virtual texturing and megatextures, with the bottleneck being the latency of pushing these abstract objects to the GPU, which are getting replaced by in-driver compiled shader programs anyway, the whole thing is ripe for a bit of fundamental change.)

Take some time to watch these. I'm also not a hardware guy, but these problems are far-far from the hardware, and the solutions are very educational from a distributed systems standpoint.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1020791/

http://www.slideshare.net/tlorach/opengl-nvidia-commandlista...

There's a private preview for big name developers (Unity already has DX12 implemented) but it's not going to be public until Windows 10 launches.

Also, it's going to be exclusive to Windows 10. Not the end of the world since 7 and 8 owners get a free upgrade.

No, and it won't be.

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