Windows 11 has been out for a few months now, and while it is a decent operating system, it has not provided many people with a compelling reason to upgrade from Windows 10. In fact, we've spent the past few months monitoring the list of Windows 11 issues and wondering when Microsoft will finish delivering the Windows 11 features (especially native support for Android apps) that it promised at launch.

This week, however, Microsoft announced a new feature coming to Windows 11, which Microsoft's Sil Vilerino described in a post on the DirectX Developer Blog as the ability for apps to perform more efficient video encoding using GPU announced the release of new DirectX 12 Video Encode features that allow apps to leverage the power of the Accelerated Graphics Engine to perform more efficient video encoding. [Windows PCs have often been shunned by video professionals who prefer Apple hardware, a trend that has intensified in recent months with the introduction of Apple's 2021 MacBook Pro. Its incredible performance and features for video professionals, including a dedicated video encoding/decoding engine and ProRes (Apple's video codec) accelerator, make it one of the best laptops you can buy for video editing.

By comparison, Windows 11's new DirectX 12 video encoding feature supports the popular H264 and HEVC codecs and is openly extensible for new codecs. The feature is still in preview and is currently only supported on select Nvidia and Intel graphics hardware, but Microsoft is working on support for some AMD graphics cards, which should be available in mid-2022. The list of currently supported chipsets is as follows:

In addition to efficiency, Microsoft claims that this new DirectX12 Video Encode API offers a lot of freedom in terms of exposing parameters of the encoding process that developers can set as they wish to configure the parameters of the encoding process as desired by the developer. Curious developers can read more about how this API works on Microsoft's Github. They can also download the latest DirectX12 Agility SDK to check out a preview version.