Microsoft details DirectX feature level 12_2

In a new developer blog post, Microsoft offers details about DirectX feature level 12_2. The software giant claims the jump from feature level 12_1 to 12_2 is "huge", you can read it over here. Notable changes include raytracing tier 1.1, mesh shading tier 1, and variable shading rate tier 2 support.

There are some big-ticket graphics features worth exposing in Direct3D 12, and important enough to be represented in a feature level. There’s a desire to streamline applications who wish to use them, and to make it easier to reason about support for those features on everyone’s gaming environments. Those big-ticket items are

DirectX raytracing

Mesh shaders

Variable rate shading

Sampler feedback

In addition, feature level 12_2 includes a grab-bag of other capabilities, listed out below. As time moves on and newer-feature-level graphics cards become more widely available, application developers’ lives are made easier since a cumbersome capability check can be removed in favor of simple reliance on presence of the new feature level.

So which hardware supports DirectX feature level 12_2? The only hardware on the market today that supports this feature level is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series and the NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs. The upcoming Ampere GPUs will thus most likely support it too. Current-generation AMD GPUs lack 12_2 support but Microsoft says RDNA 2 will support feature level 12_2. The future discrete Xe GPUs from Intel will also support it. Microsoft also indicates it's cooperating with Qualcomm to make Snapdragon SoCs compatible with feature level 12_2.