In a nutshell it means that Windows 8.1 users can expect to see better performance from their games. Of course, it is slightly more complicated than that, but this is what the Tiled Resources feature of DirectX 11.2 boils down to. It is something that is techy enough to be consigned to the Windows Extreme Blog, but in a new post Matt Sandy from the Direct3D team explains a little about how the feature works.
The blog post goes into some details about how the new feature works, but in essence it allows for better allocation of memory and more efficient data streaming. This sounds great in theory, but what does it all means? “Better framerates and more immersive game worlds”, says Matt.
Every texture used in a game is made up of a number of texels. These can be thought of as textured polygons that when pieced together hep to give objects a realistic look. What Tiled Resources enables compatible graphics cards and games to do is to only process the texels that are needed, rather than pushing them all regardless of whether they will be visible or not.
By reducing the amount of work that has to be done generating textures, processor time is freed up for moving things around the screen smoothly. The blog post explains how in some scenarios, using this technique means that less than one percent of texture data actually needs to be processed — and it’s easy to see how this would lead to a boost in performance.
This is something that Microsoft has spoken about before, including at BUILD 2013, and you can check out the video of the presentation that was given at the time:
Do you have a compatible graphics card, and have you noticed the different in Windows 8.1?
