NVIDIA Video Cards Power Square Enix DX12 Demo in Windows 10

Microsoft announced that they expect 1 Billion devices to come to market that are running Windows 10 in the next 2 years. Keep in mind that Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for the first year, so Windows 10 is expected to be quickly adopted. That means there will be 1 Billion devices running DirectX 12 very soon, which is a big deal to discrete video card makers like AMD and NVIDIA that design and sell DX12 ready graphics cards for both mobile and desktop PC gamers.

To show off DirectX 12 the guys at Microsoft turned to DigitalStorm and got a fully decked out gaming PC to use for the DX12 demos. Inside the liquid cooled system was an ASUS X99-E WS workstation motherboard with an Intel Core i7 LGA2011-v3 processor, Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory and FOUR NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan video cards running in 4-way SLI!

Microsoft then showed off a DX12 Real-time “Art&Tech” Demo from video game maker Square Enix that left the crowd super impressed from the comments seen on social media. The scene that was shown was called WITCH CHAPTER 0 [cry] and was created by the developers of AGNI’S PHILOSOPHY FINAL FANTASY REALTIME TECH DEMO. Aspects of this demo are expected to be incorporated into Square Enix’s LUMINOUS STUDIO engine and to be used in future game development. You can read more about the CG Tech Demo in the press release.

It appears that there were 63 million polygons per scene and the textures and details are beyond what most gamers have ever seen! That is over 6x more than what was possible by DX11. The real-time in-game DX12 demo is amazing and you can watch it here if you start at the 3 hour 30 minute mark. The skin tones and hair was amazing. Each hair is being rendered by the video card and goes through 50 shaders to get it to look this good!

Who is ready for DX12?

5/1/2015 Update: A video of the DX12 portion of the conference has made its way to YouTube!