Kelly, Emmaline

Comparison of DirectX11 and DirectX12 in a User Facing Multithreaded Engine: A Case Study

During my time at DePaul I was a member of the EDGE team for the Center for Identity, Inclusion, and Social Change. Following its closure, I held multiple jobs as a student leader in the Office of Multicultural Student Success as a STARS Peer Mentor and an EDGE Program Assistant. My experiences in these spaces where incredibly formative and I have much gratitude toward the staff and faculty I met there. During my senior year, I left my positions at OMSS to focus on the Independent Study that would become my thesis. This summer I will be starting a full-time position as a Junior Programmer at Disbelief.

Major: Computer Science

Senior, College of Computing and Digital Media

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Abstract

DirectX is an interface written by Microsoft to allow programmers to interface with the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on their computer. Through the interface, one can create and render graphics to the computer screen. In 2009, Microsoft released DirectX 11 (DX11) and in 2015 they released DirectX 12 (DX12). While DX11 is more user friendly and a generally simpler interface, DX12 introduced the ability to more finely control the actions of the GPU. A higher level of control allows for more optimizations to be made; however, it also involves a higher level of understanding to reach these improvements. In this project, I implemented DX12 in a DX11 multithreaded game engine to test the effects on application performance as measured in frames per a second.

Thesis Director: André Berthiaume

Department: Computer Science

Faculty Reader: Ed Keenan

Department: Computer Science

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Project Poster

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Presentation