Getting “closer” to the hardware is relatively meaningless at this point. None of this has to do with getting close to the hardware. It’s not about getting close to the hardwareĮvery time I hear someone say “but X allows you to get close to the hardware” I want to shake them. Thus, you still ended up with 1 CPU core talking to 1 GPU core. This was nice but the pipeline to the GPU was still serialized. Up until DirectX 9, the CPU, being 1 core in those days, would talk to the GPU through the “main” thread.ĭirectX 10 improved things a bit by allowing multiple cores send jobs to the GPU. Since the start of the PC, we have had the PC and the GPU (or at least, the “video card”).

If someone wants to send me a chart to put in this article, I’ll update. This article is an extreme oversimplification.

Unlike previous versions of DirectX, the difference between the new DirectX and previous generations are obvious enough that they can be explained in charts (and maybe someone with some visual design skill can do this).

Directx 11 12