Everything you need to know about Windows 10

Windows 10 for the gamer: DirectX 12.

The launch of Windows 10 is also eagerly awaited by players, given that correspond to the launch of DirectX 12. Thanks to dynamic call to the video system, the DirectX 12 promise a benefit performance sensitive, particularly with that capable hardware to function. All this will give developers more control over the computing resources available, enabling them to manage the functions that were previously assigned to the driver and the operating system. If with DirectX 11 graphics operations are operated with a single queue, the DirectX 12 will be able to schedule tasks independently and set priorities.

This principle, which is defined Asynchronous Shader, is the basis of all modern API, and also of Mantle and Vulkan, and of course DirectX 12. It is a setting that can bring a number of important advantages, in From lower latencies and greater speed in rendering frames and then response times lower. All this will allow the system to optimize calls to the video subsystem, leveraging in a better way the whole potential of the GPU.

Underlying the functioning of Asynchronous Shader units are the compute-type engine, or rendering engines physically present on the GPU. To take advantage of the new technologies of asynchronous tasks and prioritization in the future we will see increasing numbers of Asynchronous Compute Engine installed on the GPU.

The new APIs also, thanks to technology Tiled Resources, will be able to make a distinction between the portions of the texture immediately necessary, and which are less urgent. Only the first will be well placed in the GPU memory, optimizing its operation. Tiled resources breaks the texture in small portions and processes first only those portions that are urgently needed, allowing developers to offer a greater visual detail using less memory.

As for the new rasterization conservative, then, it is a more accurate method in determining if a pixel is covered by a triangle or less, thought to increase the quality and accuracy at the expense of performance. In the traditional rasterization a pixel is covered if a specific part of the pixels, as the center of the pixel itself according to the illustration above, corresponds to the triangle. With the rules of conservative rasterization, instead, a pixel is considered covered by the triangle if any part of it matches any of the parts of the triangle. This will allow developers to offer more accurate visualizations: think, for example: to the shadows created by a ray-traced. Being able to determine more accurately the edges of these surfaces are obtained shadows with less aliasing.

Turning to the most trivial, in Windows 10, there is also the new Xbox app, which allows you to interface with friends who use the Xbox ecosystem, so even Xbox One. You can check what your friends are playing, chat, recording goals and share them with clips of the game. The app also enables the Xbox multiplayer function on multiple devices, or you can play online against users of Xbox One. The first game to support this feature will be Fable Legends.

Game DVR functionality, now available with Windows 10, allows you to record the game with the new bar game. Clips can be edited and perfected as you see fit, then share them with friends through the many systems that the PC provides.

But the most important feature allowed by the new app is the possibility of playing PC games tried to Xbox One. It streams is obviously managed by the Wi-Fi network and then allows to play while sitting in front of the PC and using the controller of Xbox One, already compatible with the PC. In this regard, Microsoft has already confirmed that it intends to make Xbox One compatible mice and keyboards to extend the possibilities for interfacing.