Variable rate shading, or coarse pixel shading, is a mechanism to enable allocation of rendering performance/power at varying rates across rendered images. See D3DWDDM2_6DDI_SCANOUT_FLAGS and PFND3DWDDM2_6DDI_PREPARE_SCANOUT_TRANSFORMATION.

New DDIs were added to separate and understand transformations which occur prior to scanout, in order to (when possible) enable front-buffer rendering.

This is not always the case, depending on the timing of the pixel clock, and the layout of the data in the texture especially if there is actually compression available. Scanout may begin shortly after a VBlank, scans vertically from top to bottom of the image, and completes shortly before the next VBlank. How to request setting a mode or dynamically flipping between the original and shadow surfaces. The runtime will be explicit about this operation, as opposed to it being implicit within Present.

When to transfer contents from the application surface to the shadow surface. Whether it is more optimal for a shadow to exist. Whether or not a shadow must exist for display on a particular VidPnSource/plane. The runtime will evolve to understand these aspects of displayable surfaces: Additionally, it may not be required to exist, but may be an optimization instead. This “shadow” may not necessarily be a texture in the normal way we think of it, but may just be compression data. They can do this by allocating the texture that the app requested, along with a “shadow” texture with a format/layout that can be displayed, and then copying between the two at present-time. IHV drivers can support the creation of “displayable” textures of formats or modes that are not supported by the hardware. Super-Wet Ink is a feature that revolves around front-buffer rendering. To see features added for the most recent WDDM 2.X version, see What's new for Windows 10 display and graphics drivers. This page describes display and graphics drivers' features that were added in previous versions of WDDM 2.X for Windows 10.

Directx 12 drivers