So I recently read a few posts on DirectX 11 vs 12 and based on everything I've read, I've come to the conclusion that DirectX 11 is good for mostly all tasks and you should only use DirectX 12 to get more control over optimizations if you think you'll benefit from it, eg if your doing a large scale game.

What are your thoughts guys? Am I looking at this completely wrong? Should we all just use DirectX 12 and forget about 11?

DirectX11 is still good and state of the art.

Also for beginneres I would recommend D3D11 because ists much easier.

DirectX12 and Vulkan you should only use if you are an experienced graphics programmer how knows what he's doing.

I believe 80% of Hobby or Indie Game Projects won't ever come to a stage where they really benefit from the advantages of DX12 or Vulkan.

Even AAA Titels like Rise of the Tomb Raider don't get a real performance boost if you have a fairly modern CPU working.

The optimazations of these APIs take the most effect if your game is CPU limited because of the lower driver head.

I posted on this topic just the other day. But I think the decision of whether to use DX11 or DX12 is mostly a question of whether your user's computers can support DX12.

I mean, yes, DX12 is more difficult than DX11. DX11 is more difficult than DX10. DX10 is more difficult than DX9 and OpenGL. OpenGL is more difficult than MonoGame. MonoGame is more difficult than Unity. If you want easy: Unity. But DX11 is so difficult I wouldn't say it's really "easier" than DX12. Depending on where you're coming from knowledge wise, DX11 is an enormous learning curve. I say this never having written a DX12 program and only having compiled a Vulkan tutorial. But I think saying DX12 is more difficult than DX11 is like saying it's more difficult to walk to New York from LA than it is to walk from LA to Boston. By the time you've managed to walk to Boston, New York isn't that much further. You've already made it to Boston. If New York is where you really want to be then why not just keep going?

I think there's more opportunity to mess up in a really big way and have your game crash in DX12. (But then again you were working with unmanaged code and COM in DX11.) Multi tasking always scares people. So, it's definitely more difficult. But by the time you learn HLSL just so you can draw something to the screen, figured out how to deal with the Windows OS (at least so that you can get a process and control the window you are running in), and dealt with COM, "you've come a long ways baby" (and that doesn't even get into writing your own Python scripts to extract modeling data from Blender, writing your own modeling class, learning Win Sock for Internet game play, etc.). If you can handle that, I figure multi-tasking can't be that much more difficult.

From what I read, DX12 handles resources far better than DX11, but it means extra steps on your part to take responsibility for those resources. But that's pretty much the same difference as DX9 and DX10/11.

But as DX becomes more complicated, it's a shame it becomes more difficult to learn to do. Then again, I'm not sure DX has ever been easy. I tried for the better part of a decade to learn 3D programming in DX9 with no success to speak of. By the time I was actually ready, I ended up teaching myself DX11. And I found it reasonably easy. But that was only because I had over a decade of experience elsewhere. So, maybe it is good to learn in stepping stones.

Overall though, it seems to me that if you are going to learn DX12, you should probably use it for everything unless a more simple tool is called for. But if a more simple tool is called for DX11 is probably too much too. For example, I needed a tool to read my model files to examine the data in a human readable format so I wrote a C# program. I might prototype something in Unity or what I actually use is XNA for prototyping. Several things that I was worried about tackling directly in DX11 I prototyped in XNA first.

Again though, I've never written a single DX12 program. The closest I've come to it is program in DX11 and spending a Saturday compiling a Vulkan tutorial. I've also flipped through Frank Luna's DX12 book and found it to be remarkably similar to his DX11 book.

I would think that if you're going to do DX12, just do it and stick with it. At that point you've already dealt with the difficult part and you probably need the practice anyway even if it is a smaller project.

Another way of looking at it though is that most of your beginner projects probably would run just fine on DX9. I used XNA for years and it was built on top of DX9. Any time I ran into any type of performance issue it was because of the way I had coded it, not a real problem of exceeding it's limitations. So, you might learn DX11 before DX12 just because there's so much more information out there to help you learn DX11 and it's a pretty decent stepping stone to DX12.

@BBeck:

I don't really agree with you. The only thing: If you want it really simple take Unity or Unreal Engine.

DX11 hides a lot of work for you, which you need to take care of yourself in DX12 or Vulkan. If you are fresh to any Graphics API I believe DX11 or OpenGL are the far better choises instead of Vulkan/DX12. If you already know the other APIs and know where your bottlenecks are and why the are there, the new APIs will be the right choice. Otherwise if never touched an API like DX or OpenGL someone should stick with the much simpler and well documented Dx11 or OpenGL APIs until there's a fair understanding of how the graphics card and all the stuff is working.

If someone starts programming usally no one recommends to start with assembler to make a simple text based console game.

Regarding Hardware support: If you set the desired feature level all DX11 HW can run your DX12 Programms and you get still some of the advantages of DX12.

Titels like Rise of the Tomb Raider don't get a real performance boost if you have a fairly modern CPU working.

Don't just use it blindly because it's newer. It's an alternative to DX11, _not_ a replacement for it.

Never really thought about it that way. Seeing that their haven't been many games using DirectX 12 yet, what kind've performance increases (or maybe decreases) will there be on a well coded & optimized DirectX 12 engine compared to a DirectX 11 engine? Is it really that beneficial?