In Direct3D 11, the concept of feature levels has been further expanded to run on most downlevel hardware including Direct3D 9 cards with WDDM drivers. Before Direct3D 10, new versions of the API introduced support for new hardware capabilities, however these capabilities were optional and had to be queried with 'capability bits' or 'caps'.ĭirect3D 10.1 API was the first to use a concept of 'feature levels' to support both Direct3D 10.0 and 10.1 hardware. Direct3D 10 ĭirect3D 10 introduced a fixed set of mandatory requirements for the graphics hardware. Separate capabilities exist to indicate support for specific texture operations and resource formats these are usually specified per each texture format using a combination of capability flags, but some of these optional features are promoted to mandatory on upper feature levels. More advanced features such as new shader models and rendering stages are only exposed on up-level hardware, however the hardware is not required to support all of these feature levels and the Direct3D runtime will make the necessary translations.įeature levels allow developers to unify the rendering pipeline and use a single version of the API on both newer and older hardware, taking advantage of performance and usability improvements in the newer runtime. Some feature levels include previously optional hardware features which are promoted to a mandatory status with new revisions of the API to better expose newer hardware. The levels are grouped in strict supersets of each other, so each higher level includes all features required on every lower level.

Feature levels encapsulate hardware-specific capabilities that exist on top of common mandatory requirements and features in a particular version of the API.

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