If you are a prospective user of the next-generation WSV3, I am interested to know your DirectX "Shader Model Version", which you can determine by following these steps:
https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-03146/identifying-the-shader-model-of-your-graphics-card-in-windows.html
Given excellent initial results from an experimental partial Direct3D 12 rendering engine for WSV3 Tactical Mesoanalyst, it becomes more likely that the product will leverage Direct3D 12 exclusively for maximum CPU and GPU performance optimization, despite the increased development difficulty. The product however must be the most power-use-optimized GPU weather graphics display application on the market, which necessitates leveraging modern graphics APIs.
Win 8.1 is already a requirement, and virtually nobody uses Win 8.1 anymore, so a Windows 10 minimum requirement would guarantee D3D feature level 12.0 support and ensure efficient development against a common baseline of modern hardware, while excluding very few users from the existing WSV3 Professional user base, according to recent Steam hardware surveys.
Direct3D 12 allows applications to capitalize on special modern GPU hardware abilities where Direct3D 11 can't, namely, the multi-engine support, allowing for asynchronous compute and separate "copy" queue for resource uploads. This benefits WSV3 Tactical Mesoanalyst greatly, due to the heavy emphasis on texture streaming of both mapping and geospatial raster data.
Additionally, new HLSL shader model versions support "wave intrinsics", which uses special hardware on modern GPUs enabling far more performant algorithms in certain compute shaders. In particular, WSV3 stands to benefit greatly from use of wave intrinsics in various texture/filter operations during rendering, and also for eventual 3D volume rendering. There is an excellent paper I read last year which uses wave intrinsics on modern GPUs to deliver very high performance, power-optimized, real-time 3D volumetric rendering.
Another benefit worth mentioning of commissioning the development of full-on D3D12 rendering engine for the next-gen WSV3 is the increased facility of later creating a native Vulkan engine, which makes an eventual Linux native version far less complicated to develop.
My primary Win10 development PC with integrated Intel Iris XE graphics supports Shader Model 6.5. I would like to make 6.0 a requirement, which I believe is virtually synonymous with feature level 12.0 and therefore all Windows 10 PCs, which covers probably well-over 95% of the current WSV3 Professional hardware user-base.
