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Not dead after all: Microsoft to talk DirectX 12 at GDC
// Ars Technica
With a teaser on its DirectX blog and a new Twitter account, Microsoft has announced that there will be a new version of DirectX, and that it will be detailed at GDC later this month.
Way back in the 1990s, Microsoft produced a set of APIs for game developers. DirectX was a suite of libraries supporting 2D graphics, 3D graphics, sound, networking, and game controllers. Over the years, most parts of it have been dropped, either because they're unnecessary (for example, the best way to use your GPU for 2D graphics is to use its 3D capabilities, eliminating the need for a low-level 2D API), or because they've been superseded (XInput and XAudio replacing DirectInput and DirectSound, for example).
But one part has remained. Perhaps the most important part: Direct3D. The 3D graphics API saw a radical rework in version 10, released in 2006, and for the last decade or more has arguably been the biggest influence over the capabilities and features of modern GPUs (a role once occupied by OpenGL). While Microsoft has updated Direct3D since then with 10.1, 11, 11.1, and 11.2, the company has said very little about the future of its 3D API.
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