Stefan Mileschin

In a somewhat unusual technical/promotional blog entry called “Raising the Bar with Direct3D”, Microsoft has released some additional details on the version of Direct3D for Xbox One, along with providing a general summary of the state of Direct3D 11.2.

First and foremost, for the Xbox One we finally have an official name for the Xbox One’s version of Direct3D along with some confirmation of some general details about the API. The XB1’s version of the API is being called Direct3D 11.x – X as in Xbox, not an algebraic X – and as expected it’s a superset of Direct3D 11.2. Microsoft doesn’t go into further detail on what else that superset contains, but traditionally we’d expect to see further API calls that are specifically designed to take advantage of the underlying APU, including of course the low-level programming constructs to do close to metal programming and fully exploit quirks such as the console’s 32MB of eSRAM.

Furthermore it’s interesting to note that Microsoft also took the time to specifically mention API overhead in a high-level context, and that they’ve been doing a lot of work to chip away at said overhead for the Xbox One. This is fairly similar to how Microsoft is said to have approached Direct3D for the 360, being able to exploit the fixed platform to remove some of the overhead from abstraction while maintaining the functionality of the high level API functions.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7420/m...i-direct3d-11x