Abstract Microsoft Direct3D* 12 is an exciting leap forward in PC gaming technology, giving developers greater control of their games and adding greater CPU efficiency and scalability.

The left side shows a D3D 9 style pipeline, which is what the application uses to do its work. The hardware on the right side of Figure 2 needs to be programmed. State 1 represents the shader code. State 2 is a combination of the rasterizer and the control flow linking the rasterizer to the shaders. State 3 is the linkage between the blend and pixel shader. The D3D Vertex Shader effects hardware states 1 & 2, the Rasterizer state 2, Pixel shader states 1-3, and so on. Most drivers do not want to submit the calls at the same time as the application. They prefer to record and defer until the work is complete so that they can see what the application actually wants. This means additional CPU overhead as old and outdated data is marked “dirty.” The driver’s control flow checks the states of each object at draw time and programs the hardware to match the state the game has set. With the extra work, resources are drained and things can go wrong. Ideally once the game sets the pipeline state, the driver knows what the game intends and programs the hardware once. Figure 3 shows the D3D 12 pipeline, which does just that in what is called the Pipeline State Object (PSO).