What is DirectX 12 Ultimate and what does it mean for PC gamers?

pocket-lint.com:

(Pocket-lint) — DirectX has been knocking around for years and allows developers to create games that can make the most of the components of your gaming PC.

The first version of DirectX launched back in 1995 and has seen several updates since then, with each iteration helping PC gamers fully enjoy all sorts of fantastic PC games. But what does DirectX do and what's so special about DirectX 12 Ultimate? 

Keep on reading to find out. 

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) which allow games to «talk» to various components in your gaming machine, including your graphics card, RAM and more. It was developed to make it easier for games to access these essential components while also maintaining the security and integrity of your machine. 

DirectX is useful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it acts as a bridge in this way to gaming computers all over the world which naturally have a variety of different components in them. After all, every gaming PC is different and certainly not as universal internally as something like the Xbox Series X console. 

DirectX quickly became an essential part of gaming on Windows. Doom was the first game published with DirectX. Before that Doom ran via MS-DOS and had to be ported to work with Windows. It was Valve's President Gabe Newell (who then worked for Microsoft) who led the project to port Doom into DirectX and that's how the future of PC gaming began. 

Since then DirectX has been through several iterations with upgrades to improve how it worked:

DirectX 12 Ultimate represents a significant upgrade to the system and the future of PC gaming. It introduced a number of new features including DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading,