



DirectX 12 Ultimate is Microsoft’s latest graphics API, which codifies NVIDIA RTX’s innovative technologies first introduced in 2018, as the cross-platform standard for next-generation, real-time graphics. It offers APIs for Ray Tracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shading, Sampler Feedback, and more, enabling developers to implement cinema-quality reflections, shadows, and lighting in games and real-time applications.



"DirectX 12 Ultimate unlocks the latest in graphics hardware technology with support for ray tracing, mesh shaders, and variable rate shading. It’s the new gold standard for the next generation of games.”

- Marcus Wassmer, Director of Engineering, Graphics, Epic Games

“By investing in next-gen graphics features using DirectX 12 Ultimate, we know our work will benefit gamers on PC and future consoles, and the game will look the way we dreamed.”

- Anton Yudintsev, CEO, Gaijin Entertainment

Ray Tracing

Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) API extends DirectX 12 to support real-time ray tracing, allowing developers to combine ray tracing with traditional rasterization and compute techniques. DirectX Raytracing enables cinematic reflections, shadows, and lighting in games and real-time applications, while taking full advantage of NVIDIA RTX’s dedicated ray tracing cores.

Mesh Shading

Mesh shading advances NVIDIA’s geometry processing architecture by offering a new shader model for the vertex, tessellation, and geometry shading stages of the graphics pipeline, supporting more flexible and efficient approaches for computation of geometry. This more flexible model makes it possible, for example, to support an order of magnitude more objects per scene, by moving the key performance bottleneck of object list processing off the CPU and into highly parallel GPU mesh shading programs. Mesh shading also enables new algorithms for GPU-driven culling and object LOD management.

Variable Rate Shading

Variable Rate Shading (VRS) allows developers to control shading rate dynamically, shading as little as once per sixteen pixels or as often as eight times per pixel. The application specifies shading rate using a combination of a shading-rate surface and a per-primitive (triangle) value. VRS is a very powerful tool that allows developers to shade more efficiently, reducing work in regions of the screen where full resolution shading would not give any visible image quality benefit, and therefore improving frame rate. Several classes of VRS-based algorithms have already been identified, which can vary shading work based on content level of detail (Content Adaptive Shading), rate of content motion (Motion Adaptive Shading), and for VR applications, lens resolution and eye position (Foveated Rendering).

Sampler Feedback

Sampler Feedback shares the same philosophy as Variable Rate Shading: work smarter to reduce GPU load and improve performance. It is enabled by a hardware capability in our Turing architecture called Texture Space Shading. Developers can use Texture Space Shading to efficiently shade static objects at a lower rate (for example, every third frame) and reuse the object’s colors as calculated in previous frames. This work reuse can be combined with ray tracing, especially in the case of global illumination, which is a common example of a slow-changing and very expensive shading computation.



Turing Texture Space Shading

NVIDIA Developer Blog Turing GPUs introduce a new shading capability called Texture Space Shading (TSS), where shading values are dynamically computed and stored in a texture as texels in a texture space. Read More...