The jump from DX11's "automatic" to DX12's "stick shift" programming was like trading in your comfy minivan for a race car with no power steering. Sure, you could crash spectacularly - but man could you fly if you knew what you were doing!
Buckle up, the API wars are just getting started! (The image is a fun play on what Yoda says 'begun the clone war has' in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones Yoda.)
Modern GPUs aren't your grandpa's graphics cards anymore. What started as simple triangle pushers have morphed into some unholy fusion of CPU, GPU, TPU and who-knows-what-else. We've got ray tracing cores, AI accelerators, and rumors of quantum bits creeping in. DX12's explicit control was just the beginning.
The pipeline explosion is out of control. Remember when we just had vertex and pixel shaders? Now we're juggling compute shaders, mesh shaders, ray tracing shaders, and probably "AI mood shaders" by next Tuesday.
Will It Play Nice With Others?
Spoiler: Probably not.
Vulkan will keep doing its cross-platform thing. Metal will stay in Apple's walled garden. WebGPU will keep pretending it's the future. And DX13? Microsoft will likely double down on Windows integration while throwing in a brand new shader language just to keep us guessing.
The painful truth? Backward compatibility is getting tossed out the window again. Your carefully crafted DX12 engine? Start warming up those rewriting fingers.
Sometimes it just makes you so angry!
We Don't Want DX13
We can't fight it! Because progress waits for no one. The hardware's changing. The techniques are changing. And frankly, we're running out of clever ways to bolt AI upscaling and ray tracing onto APIs designed when GeForce 4 was hot stuff.
Yes, it'll hurt. Yes, there will be tears. But when has that ever stopped us before? The ride's only getting wilder from here - let's just hope the track holds together!
Change is inevitable... - As Thanos said "I am inevitable" in Avengers: Endgame. We can't stop it coming! DirectX 13 is going to come and it's going to be a game changer.
Smart Pipelines
We've been through the automatic and manual phases of DirectX - but we're seeing a new generation of innovations in 13 - for example, 'smart' pipelines that are driven by AI - that can adapt and change (AI will decide the pipeline configuration depending on the data/criteria).
It's a no brainer when you think of the current trends - integrating AI into the pipeline so it adapts and learns will happen - can you imagine it?
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