The DirectX 12 Performance Preview: AMD, NVIDIA, & Star Swarm
by Ryan Smith on February 6, 2015 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Microsoft
- NVIDIA
- DirectX 12
First Thoughts
Bringing our preview of DirectX 12 to a close, what we’re seeing today is both a promising sign of what has been accomplished so far and a reminder of what is left to do. As it stands much of DirectX 12’s story remains to be told – features, feature levels, developer support, and more will only finally be unveiled by Microsoft next month at GDC 2015. So today’s preview is much more of a beginning than an end when it comes to sizing up the future of DirectX.
But for the time being we’re finally at a point where we can say the pieces are coming together, and we can finally see parts of the bigger picture. Drivers, APIs, and applications are starting to arrive, giving us our first look at DirectX 12’s performance. And we have to say we like what we’ve seen so far.
With DirectX 12 Microsoft and its partners set out to create a cross-vendor but still low-level API, and while there was admittedly little doubt they could pull it off, there has always been the question of how well they could do it. What kind of improvements and performance could you truly wring out of a new API when it has to work across different products and can never entirely avoid abstraction? The answer as it turns out is that you can still enjoy all of the major benefits of a low-level API, not the least of which are the incredible improvements in CPU efficiency and multi-threading.
That said, any time we’re looking at an early preview it’s important to keep our expectations in check, and that is especially the case with DirectX 12. Star Swarm is a best case scenario and designed to be a best case scenario; it isn’t so much a measure of real world performance as it is technological potential.
But to that end, it’s clear that DirectX 12 has a lot of potential in the right hands and the right circumstances. It isn’t going to be easy to master, and I suspect it won’t be a quick transition, but I am very interested in seeing what developers can do with this API. With the reduced overhead, the better threading, and ultimately a vastly more efficient means of submitting draw calls, there’s a lot of potential waiting to be exploited.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
245 Comments
View All Comments
OrphanageExplosion - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
On a tiny minority of titles.bloodypulp - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Battlefield 4Battlefield Hardline
Thief
Star Citizen
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare
Civilization: Beyond Earth
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Mirror's Edge 2
Sniper Elite 3
... and growing every day.
bloodypulp - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Who needs to wait for DX12? Mantle is running great for me right now. :)sireangelus - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
would you do one quick test using an 8core fx?johnny_boy - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Would have loved to see this, and some lower end CPUs even.editorsorgtfo - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
What about threaded CPUs ? for example 1 core 2 threads old pentium CPUs and 2 cores 4 threads i3 CPUs ? can you still count that them as 2 cores and 4 cores ?
I wanna ask this on the anandtech comment section but I don't have an account there XD
boe - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
What I care about are great graphics. It is a shame there is no Crytek 4 engine to show off what DX12 could do. MS should have hired the original crytek developers to create some showpiece game.Gigaplex - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
The API won't really change what you can do compared to DX11 other than reduce some system requirements. The feature levels are what provides new eye candy, and this preview doesn't cover that aspect. Wait until it hits retail, you'll probably see some fancy tech demos.Thermalzeal - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
I have one big question to ask.Since Direct X12 is resulting in significant performance gains, what is the potential for these improvements to translate over to the Xbox One? While I'm sure the Xbox One already has some of these bare metal improvements, due to the focus of the device...is it possible that DX12 will make the Xbox One more powerful than the PS4?
Ryan Smith - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
"Since Direct X12 is resulting in significant performance gains, what is the potential for these improvements to translate over to the Xbox One?"Only Microsoft really knows the answer to that one. But I would be shocked beyond belief if the XB1's D3D 11.X API didn't already implement many of these optimizations. It is after all a fixed console, where low-level APIs have been a mainstay since day one.
"is it possible that DX12 will make the Xbox One more powerful than the PS4?"
In a word, no. The best case scenario for Microsoft is that Sony implements their own low-level API (if they haven't already) and we're back at square one. APIs can't make up for hardware differences when both parties have the means and influence to create what would be similar APIs.