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DirectX 12 has a variety of applications in multimedia environments, especially gaming and video. When it comes to the latter, it already provides APIs for GPU-accelerated video decoding and processing, as well as motion estimation. Microsoft is now introducing a new API for video encoding to DirectX 12 too, and it's native in Windows 11. Essentially, the Video Encode API allows video engines to make use of the GPU in order to perform video encoding in line with the standards set by DirectX 12. This means that third-party developers can utilize this capability in their applications too. It is important to note that Vulkan already includes APIs for video encoding and decoding for H264 and H265 codecs. As it stands, the codecs currently supported by this API are H264 and HEVC. Microsoft has recommended that developers should query the support for each codec and their respective encoding tools first because they have driver requirements in place. The Video Encode API is included in Windows 11 by default and can also be utilized via the DirectX 12 Agility SDK (version 1.700.10-preview or later). The minimum hardware platform and driver version for vendors is defined below: Vendor Supported platforms Minimum video driver version AMD Radeon RX 5000 series or greater Ryzen 2xxxx series or greater In development – ETA Q2 ‘2022 Intel Tiger Lake Ice Lake Alder Lake (from early 2022) v30.0.100.9955 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10xx and above GeForce RTX 20xx and above Quadro RTX NVIDIA RTX v471.41 Microsoft's blog post outlines the process for this video encoding as well as the methods that developers can call, so if that sounds something right up your alley, do check it out here. Microsoft announces Video Encode API for DirectX 12, native in Windows 11

In the realm of PC gaming, there is an enormous industry push toward open-source graphics APIs like Vulkan. Performant, cross-platform software like Vulkan enables the incredible performance of games like Doom Eternal and allows low budget titles like Farming Simulator 22 to run on Mac OS X and Linux. Gaming juggernaut Microsoft have maintained DirectX dominance through its Xbox brand and studio acquisitions, and now it seems to be creeping into Mesa, Linux and BSD’s open-source software implementation of OpenGL. Jesse Natalie, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, is working on adding and improving D3D12 compute support in OpenGL through Mesa and hints that future enhancements are in the pipeline. From Jesse's merge request: This adds some parallel state tracking for compute. In some cases, graphics state tracking is simply extended (e.g. resources bound to shaders), in others, it's duplicated (e.g. additional pipeline caches), and in others it's refactored. The final result is support for compute ARB_compute_shader with a bit of a slow path for indirects. Now that compute support is available, we can start hooking up compute shaders for things that need emulation in the future, like a faster path for indirect dispatches that need state vars. While the purpose of D3D12 compute shader support in Mesa is not clear, it could be advantageous in the data center. Perhaps in Azure, where Microsoft offers GPU optimized VMs for workloads that require more specialized silicon. It’s worth noting that this merge request, and the work it builds upon, is not related to any official port of DirectX 12 to Linux. Source: gitlab.freedesktop.org via Phoronix DirectX 12 support is infiltrating Linux under the radar