But they could have different feature levels. You might visit a computer hardware store or friend you borrow all your hardware from, and find two graphics cards both compatible with your Windows 10 desktop machine. “Feature level” is a property of your graphics card. In Direct3D, a “feature level” is the name we use to describe a bunch of graphics card capabilities. At the same time, Direct3D 12 provides ways for the differentiation between graphics cards to be manageable by applications, especially as technology improves and evolves forward– applications can take advantage of the cool new hardware features as they become available.

That kind of standardization is hugely valuable and has made life easier for everyone who writes graphical applications on Windows. Of course, Direct3D 12 provides a set of functionalities that are guaranteed for any graphics card with a Direct3D 12 driver on Windows. There’s differentiation.ĭifferentiation not only of overall performance characteristics, but the kinds of available functionality. If you’re a game developer who has spent any amount of time with computer hardware, or perhaps a computer game which simulates working with it, you will know that graphics cards are not all the same.

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