PCSX4 Progress report: 2018

PCSX4 now introduces support for the next version of Direct3D, the 3D graphics API at the heart of DirectX. This new version of Direct3D is much faster and more efficient when compared to any previous version. Direct3D 12 enables richer scenes, more objects, more complex effects, and full utilisation of modern GPU hardware.

To further improve the CPU efficiency involving Direct3D games, DirectX12 will no longer support an immediate context associated with a device. Instead, games report and then submit command lists that incorporate drawing and resource operation calls. The command functions can be submitted from multiple threads to one or more command processing queues, which manage the execution of the commands.

This fundamental software change boosted single-threaded efficiency by allowing apps to pre-compute rendering work for later re-use, and it takes advantage of multi-core systems by simply splitting rendering work throughout multiple core threads.