Microsoft released a blog post today urging Developers across the board to make use of their new Direct3D 11.2, which is set to ship with Windows 8.1 as well as have a superset that will feature on the Xbox One.

Microsoft detailed some of the advances made in the latest release.

• The introduction of tiled resources, a new hardware feature for efficiently managing enormous volumes of data on the GPU more efficiently, enabling unprecedented levels of detail as well as more immersive open-world gameplay without making gamers sit through annoying “level loads.”
• Excellent tools in visual studio for analyzing and debugging code built using Direct3D 11.
• Improved performance when accessing memory shared between CPU and GPU when executing compute workloads.
• Programming model improvements, including advances in HLSL that enables developers to write more manageable shader code, and reduce runtime cycles spent on shader compilation.
• Improved performance and efficiency on mobile form factors by reducing presentation overhead and enabling hardware accelerated overlays & scalers. This enables better game performance on high-resolution displays, and improved rendering latency.

Source: Microsoft-news