Present overhead improvements

Starting with Windows 8.1, the Microsoft Direct3D runtime handles internal swap buffers more efficiently, reducing the processing load on the GPU. To support this better performance, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.3 and later drivers must support a new present device driver interface (DDI) and new texture formats as shared surfaces:

WDDM 1.3 present DDI

These reference topics describe how to implement this capability in your display miniport driver and user-mode display driver:

Texture format support for shared surfaces

Drivers should support both sharing resources and shareable backbuffers for these additional texture formats from the DXGI_FORMAT enumeration:

  • DXGI_FORMAT_A8_UNORM
  • DXGI_FORMAT_R8_UNORM
  • DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8_UNORM
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC1_TYPELESS\*
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC1_UNORM
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC1_UNORM_SRGB
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC2_TYPELESS\*
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC2_UNORM
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC2_UNORM_SRGB
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC3_TYPELESS\*
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC3_UNORM
  • DXGI_FORMAT_BC3_UNORM_SRGB

In addition, drivers should support the DXGI_FORMAT_L8_UNORM placeholder format if they support Microsoft Direct3D 11 and later on Direct3D feature level 9 hardware. DXGI_FORMAT_L8_UNORM is functionally equivalent to the D3DDDIFMT_L8 format.

Drivers should also support additional texture formats from the D3DDDIFORMAT enumeration:

  • D3DDDIFMT_G8R8
  • D3DDDIFMT_R8