Developing Microsoft® DirectX®12 applications

Microsoft® DirectX®12 provides low-level APIs for creating games and other graphics applications. 

Here on GPUOpen, we not only provide tools and libraries to help you with the development of your Vulkan application, but we’ve produced quite a few detailed blogs and videos to support you along the way too. 

Videos

Our engineers regularly present at industry conferences on topics relating to DirectX.

These links to YouTube videos will usually provide an opportunity to download the slides shown as well.

Don’t miss our other videos about DirectX and more available here on GPUOpen!

AMD RDNA™ 2 – DirectX® Raytracing 1.1 - YouTube link

Graphics feature architect Rys Sommefeldt provides a short presentation on the major advantages of the new API, and how to best utilize it on AMD RDNA™ 2-based hardware.

AMD RDNA™ 2 - DirectX® 12 Ultimate: Variable Rate Shading - YouTube link

Engineer Stephan Hodes provides a short description how VRS works, and how AMD’s FidelityFX Variable Shading technique can assist with integrating VRS into your engine.

AMD RDNA™ 2 - DirectX® 12 Ultimate: Sampler Feedback and Mesh Shaders - YouTube link

Engineer Colin Riley provides a short description of Sampler Feedback and Mesh Shaders, as well as important performance guidelines that graphics developers should consider when using AMD RDNA™ 2-based GPUs.

Porting Your Engine to Vulkan® or DirectX®12

This talk by AMD's Adam Sawicki at Digital Dragons in 2018 discusses how to port your engine to Vulkan® or DirectX®12.

Presentations

If you’re just getting started with DirectX12, these presentations are an excellent place to start to understand the concepts.

Concurrency Model in Explicit Graphics APIs

Dr. Matthäus G. Chajdas and Dominik Baumeister give a (slightly) more in-depth look for people interested in graphics programming. They prepare the mental model for explicit graphics APIs such as DirectX12 and Vulkan.

Memory Management in Vulkan and DX12

Adam Sawicki introduces memory management in Vulkan and DirectX 12 with a detailed presentation on the different memory types, gives some tips and tricks, and discusses the libraries involved.

Don’t miss more presentations on DirectX and other topics available on GPUOpen!

Ready to put things into practice? Our “HelloD3D12” sample is a great way to get hands-on and see how everything works.

We have more DirectX samples further down the page too.

HelloD3D12 DirectX® 12 Sample

HelloD3D12 is a small, introductory Direct3D 12 sample, which shows how to set up a window and render a textured quad complete with proper uploading handling, multiple frames queued and constant buffers.

Libraries and tools

If you’re looking for some welcome help with allocating and managing memory, our Direct3D 12 Memory Allocator (D3D12MA) library is exactly what you need!

D3D12 Memory Allocator

The D3D12 Memory Allocator (D3D12MA) is a C++ library that provides a simple and easy-to-integrate API to help you allocate memory for DirectX®12 buffers and textures.

AMD Radeon™ Raytracing Analyzer

AMD Radeon™ Raytracing Analyzer (RRA) is a tool which allows you to investigate the performance of your raytracing applications and highlight potential bottlenecks.

AMD Radeon™ Memory Visualizer

AMD Radeon™ Memory Visualizer (RMV) is a tool to allow you to gain a deep understanding of how your application uses memory for graphics resources.

AMD Radeon™ GPU Profiler

AMD RGP gives you unprecedented, in-depth access to a GPU. Easily analyze graphics, async compute usage, event timing, pipeline stalls, barriers, bottlenecks, and other performance inefficiencies.

AMD Radeon™ GPU Analyzer

Radeon GPU Analyzer is an offline compiler and performance analysis tool for DirectX®, Vulkan®, SPIR-V™, OpenGL® and OpenCL™.

Don’t forget, you can also find DirectX support with our FidelityFX effects. We also have other tools and SDKs which support DirectX.

Ready to learn more?

Take a look at our dedicated DirectX 12 and DirectX 12 Ultimate pages here on GPUOpen. 

There’s also plenty of blog posts that are about or mention DirectX12 to look through:

glTFSample Cauldron Sample Project

This sample demonstrates how to use most of Cauldron's features. It is also a useful reference for getting started with developing your own samples and prototypes.

AMD Freesync™ Premium Pro (HDR) Sample

This sample demonstrates how to enable Freesync Premium Pro (HDR) with the DirectX® 12 and Vulkan® APIs.

CrossfireAPI11

This sample demonstrates how to use the explicit Crossfire™ application programming interface (API).

nBody DirectX® 12 Sample (asynchronous compute version)

This is a slightly modified version of the Microsoft D3D12nBodyGravity sample, This sample demonstrates the use of asynchronous compute shaders (multi-engine) to simulate an n-body gravity system.

SSAA11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This sample demonstrates some of the ways in which to reduce scene aliasing without using a post process technique.

SilhouetteTessellation11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This SDK sample implements PN Triangles and Phong tessellation. It also shows how to optimize performance by using adaptive tessellation techniques.

SeparableFilter11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This sample presents a technique for achieving highly optimized, user-defined separable filters.

MLAA11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This sample demonstrates a post-process pixel shader technique that applies fullscreen anti-aliasing to an image.

GPUParticles11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This sample demonstrates how to implement a simple GPU-based particle system.

ForwardPlus11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This sample provides an example implementation of the Forward+ algorithm, which extends traditional forward rendering to support high numbers of dynamic lights while maintaining performance.

DepthBoundsTest11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

The DepthBoundsTest11 sample shows how to use the Depth Bounds driver extension.

TiledLighting11 DirectX® 11 SDK Sample

This sample provides an example implementation of two tile-based light culling methods: Forward+ and Tiled Deferred.

Other GPUOpen samples that use DirectX12

Barycentrics DirectX® Shader Extension Samples

The Barycentrics samples show how to enable intrinsic instructions in your DirectX®11 or DirectX®12 HLSL code.

Developing with Vulkan®? We have a similar page for Vulkan® developers!

Developing Vulkan® applications

Discover our Vulkan blog posts, presentations, samples, and more. Find out how we can help you create and optimize your Vulkan applications!

Explore more

Software release blogs

Our handy software release blogs will help you make good use of our tools, SDKs, and effects, as well as sharing the latest features with new releases.

Videos

Words not enough? How about pictures? How about moving pictures? We have some amazing videos to share with you!

Samples Library

Browse all our useful samples. Perfect for when you're needing to get started, want to integrate one of our libraries, and much more.

Developer Guides

Browse our technical blogs, and find valuable advice on developing with AMD hardware, ray tracing, Vulkan®, DirectX®, Unreal Engine, and lots more.

DirectX®12 Ultimate

Microsoft® DirectX®12 Ultimate provides APIs for creating games and other graphics applications.

DirectX®12

Microsoft® DirectX®12 provides APIs for creating games and other graphics applications. Find out how we can help you get the best out of DirectX®12.

Guest Posts

Since we launched GPUOpen back in 2016, we’ve had a steady flow of guest posts from, or in collaboration with, a variety of games developers.

Vulkan®

Vulkan® gives software developers control over the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of AMD Radeon™ GPUs and multi-core CPUs.