Microsoft has revealed the requirements of the next DirectX12 feature level, namely 12_2. Keep in mind that although this isn’t exactly an upgrade to the API, it’ll be instrumental in determining which GPU architectures support the core features of DX12 Ultimate. To quality as a DirectX 12_2 architecture, the GPU has to support the following:
| Feature | 12_2 minimum | Public spec |
| Required driver model | WDDM 2.0 | |
| Shader Model | 6.5 | Link |
| Raytracing tier | Tier 1.1 | Link |
| Variable shading rate | Tier 2 | Link |
| Mesh shader tier | Tier 1 | Link |
| Sampler feedback | Tier 0.9 | Link |
| Resource Binding Tier | Tier 3 | Link |
| Tiled Resources (Tiled rendering/resource binding?) | Tier 3 | |
| Conservative Rasterization | Tier 3 | Link |
| Root Signature Tier | 1.1 | Link |
| DepthBoundsTestSupported | TRUE | Link |
| WriteBufferImmediateSupportFlags | Direct, Compute, Bundle | |
| MaxGPUVirtualAddressBitsPerResource | 40 | |
| MaxGPUVirtualAddressBitsPerProcess | 40 |
Most of these features were introduced by NVIDIA’s Turing GPUs on a hardware level, and with DX12_2, the rest will come into play as well. You can read more about them here:
| Feature | 12_2 value |
| WaveOps | TRUE |
| OutputMergerLogicOp | TRUE |
| VPAndRTArrayIndexFromAnyShaderFeedingRasterizerSupportWithoutGSEmulation | TRUE |
| CopyQueueTimestampQueriesSupported | TRUE |
| CastingFullyTypedFormatSupported | TRUE |
| Int64ShaderOps (INT64 Support?) | TRUE |
As per Microsoft’s FAQ, all NVIDIA RTX GPUs, Turing and upcoming Ampere as well as AMD’s RDNA 2 (Navi2x) graphics cards will comply with the DirectX 12_2 feature level. Furthermore, Intel’s XPG GPUs slated to arrive next year will also support it. Unfortunately, AMD’s RDNA 1 or Navi 10 based RX 5000 series won’t be fully DX12_2 compliant.
