I recommend reading over the Game Programming Patterns, and a couple introductory game development tutorials. From the simple infinite game loop, to factories or observers - you’ll find these patterns repeated in a lot of codebases and tutorials without much explanation. ☑ Learn common design patterns and architectures. I recommend following the tutorials on the Learn OpenGL website, it does a great job of going over each concept and explaining them with visual diagrams. From transformation matrices, to vertices, to techniques like depth buffers or shadow maps - these are all things you’ll exercise in DirectX 12 and previous experience with a simpler API (like OpenGL) would make the process easier. ☑ Learn the basics of graphics programming. Tips like using auto to quickly define variables will help you work faster or understand code examples from tutorials. ☑ Refresh on modern C++ standards from C++ 11, 17, and maybe 20. Most tutorials for OpenGL will cover this process, ideally you just need to learn how to do it in Visual Studio (instead of going down a CMake rabbit hole). Like much graphics projects, you’ll find yourself linking to DLLs to access APIs from graphic drivers ( like DirectX 12 itself) - or maybe other libraries like DirectXTK for utilities or imgui for UI. These concepts will be used heavily since graphics programming tends to be very low level and deal with streams of data inside “buffers”. ☑ Dig into advanced C++ concepts like I/O streaming or memory allocation (like stack vs heap).

☑ Learn all basic C++ concepts like the basic types (int, vector, etc), classes, conditionals, loops - you’ll need a lot of it. So these are the topics you should brush up on prior to DirectX 12: The more knowledge you can come reinforced with will make your journey a breeze.

It’s not a wrong approach - though you’ll find it can become overwhelming quickly looking everything up. Is this a DirectX 12 API or just C++ stuff? The more I rushed I found myself asking these questions.

I never like to say “you absolutely need to know X before Y”, but when you’re learning a new concept it’s easier when you know what’s what.

Windows 11 directx 12