NVIDIA just announced the GameWorks DX12 during GDC 2017. The new GameWorks DX12 is a collection of resources for game developers that should increase in-game realism, and shorten product cycles in titles designed using DirectX 12.
These resources include updates to the NVIDIA GameWorks SDK for creating interactive cinematic experiences on PC games , new developer tools, and a new Game Ready Driver. Together, they provide developers with substantial performance gains, multiple new rendering and simulation effects. More details from the PR below:
NVIDIA Brings World’s Most Advanced Real-Time Simulation and Rendering Technologies to DX12
NVIDIA today announced GameWorks™ DX12, a collection of resources for game developers that will increase realism and shorten product cycles in titles designed using DirectX 12, Microsoft’s API that unifies graphics and simulation.
These resources include updates to the NVIDIA GameWorks SDK for creating interactive cinematic experiences on PC games; updates to the NVIDIA VRWorks™ SDK for creating immersive virtual reality experiences; new developer tools; and a new Game Ready Driver.
Together, they provide developers with substantial performance gains, multiple new rendering and simulation effects, and other capabilities to help create games optimised for DirectX 12.
“We have invested over 500 engineering-years of work to deliver the most comprehensive platform for developing DirectX 12 games, including the world’s most advanced physics simulation engine,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. “These resources will ensure that GeForce gamers can enjoy the very best game experience on DirectX 12 titles, just as they have on DirectX 11 games.”
GameWorks Physics Simulation Comes to DX12
The latest version of GameWorks builds on the over 2 million lines of documented code that are available to developers, providing them with a huge range of rendering and simulation effects. GameWorks technologies are currently used in more than 1,000 titles.
DirectX 12 introduced asynchronous compute, which unified graphics and simulation by allowing GPUs to run non-graphics workloads for effects such as post-processing, lighting and physics. But these effects are currently limited because most games can only allocate a few milliseconds to run these types of non-graphical simulations while still delivering smooth gameplay.
VRWorks Comes to DirectX 12
VRWorks includes APIs, libraries and features that enable headset and application developers to achieve a new level of immersion in VR. It has been updated to support DirectX 12 with better performance, lower latency and plug-and-play compatibility. It will be supported in the Unity 2017.1 beta, which ships this spring, and the Unreal Engine 4 game engines — thus covering a majority of game development platforms.
Game Ready Driver Optimised for DX12
NVIDIA also revealed an upcoming Game Ready Driver optimised for DirectX 12 games. The company refined code in the driver and worked side by side with game developers to deliver performance increases of up to 16 percent on average across a variety of DirectX 12 games, such as Ashes of the Singularity, Gears of War 4, Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Tom Clancy’s The Division.
