Coming up in RetroArch 1.7.1 - New Direct3D 11 video driver - with XMB support!

 RetroArch 1.7.1 will be launched with new Direct3D 10/11/12 drivers. 

Right now, Direct 3D 10 and 12 only work with the RGUI menu driver. However, Direct3D 11 was just updated to support the XMB and MaterialUI menu drivers as well! 

What you can also see in this video is the ribbon shader effect that we have ported over from OpenGL/Vulkan. 

NOTE: Direct3D 11 driver will be useful for software rendered cores. Depending on your video driver and GPU, Direct3D 11 can be a big performance boost compared to the existing D3D9/OpenGL/Vulkan video drivers available. 

Right now, Direct3D 12 performs the worst out of the available video drivers. We believe this can be attributed to our relative inexperience with this API, and it could be the case that any mistake made can come with big performance costs due to the low-level nature of D3D12.

Also, we have not been sitting still in other Direct3D-related areas! For instance, we will have a Direct3D 8 driver now as well, and this driver will have the added additional side benefit of bringing the Xbox OG port back from the dead! (yes, the 2001 console, not the Xbox One). On top of that, the D3D9 Cg driver will now have working XMB and MaterialUI support. No menu shader effects yet though with D3D9 Cg, although we do want to eventually get there.

Overall, big and exciting stuff in the pipeline for 1.7.1! And we are not just going to stop with bringing back the Xbox OG port. Post-1.7.1, we want to bring back Xbox 360 too, and as an additional bonus, D3D9 HLSL will also become possible then, no longer making D3D9 exclusive only to Cg.

RetroArch's modularity opens so many doors. We will expand on this in a later article once we have 1.7.1 out of the door.

For now, it's important what Windows users will be able to take advantage of which Direct3D drivers -

Direct3D10 - available on Windows Vista and up

Direct3D11 - available on Windows 7 and up

Direct3D12 - available on Windows 10

Here are some early performance comparisons -

 2048 core with Direct3D9 + Cg - 1680fps

 2048 core with Vulkan       - 1744fps 

 2048 core with OpenGL - 1450/1488 fps 

2048 core with Direct3D11        - 2421fps 

This test was performed on a Windows 10 PC with an Intel i7 7700k and a Titan XP GPU.