Home Gaming DirectX 12 shows fps gains of up to 600 %

DirectX 12 shows fps gains of up to 600 %

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Dx12

The dream for low-level access to PC gaming hardware is one that’s been alive for forever. PC gamers have looked on at console games – and while shunning them – wondered how such underpowered hardware could produce such good visuals.

Take the old-gen version of GTA V on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Resolution and frame rate aside, it looks amazing for something that’s running on machines with 512Mb of memory. It’s all go to do with the fact that they’re unified platforms, running with low level access to the hardware. Those dreams are starting to become a reality thanks to new APIs like Mantle and DirectX 12.

We’ve seen Mantle in the wild, and it hasn’t brought as much of an increase as we’d hoped. That’s because it’s still largely tied to just AMD’s hardware. DirectX 12 promises to level the playing field, bringing gains to both AMD and Nvidia hardware. It is, however, exclusive to Windows 10. By the looks of it, it’ll be worth upgrading your Operating System.

The folks at Anandtech were given new DirectX12 supporting drivers by both AMD and Nvidia and played around with them – and found that DirectX 12 is filled with a great deal of potential. Running Stardock’s Star Swarm demo, they found some impressive gains over DirectX 11.

Nvidia’s beastly GTX 980 achieved 26.7 frames-per-second with all the bells and whistles on DirectX 11, and a much nicer 66.8 on DirectX 12 – that’s a neat 250 % increase. As for Team Red, the currently flagship saw a nearly 600 % increase. The Radeon R9 290X scored 8.3 frames-per-second on DirectX 11, and 49.2 on DirectX 12.

Swarm

Star Swarm is, of course, built for this purpose and represents a best case scenario. It’s unlikely that we’ll see such incredible games in the real world – but it does show that there are indeed gains to be had. It mostly comes through the API’s ability to do more efficient load balancing across all cores.

“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.”

The astute amongst you would have realised that Microsoft’s Xbox One runs on AMD, and the system will be getting DirectX 12 support. Does that mean we’ll see wild, 600 percent increases in performance? It’s unlikely that they’ll be this high; remember that the Xbox One already has low level access to the system’s innards. Touted figures at the moment suggest the Xbox One will however see gains of up to 30% in CPU-bound situations. DX 12 should help leverage multithreading – so we’ll almost certainly see some sort of gain on the console. Remember though, that nothing like this exists in a vaccum, and that Sony’s tweaking its SDK and APIs to allow for similar gains.

Last Updated: February 10, 2015

50 Comments

  1. DBL_ZA

    February 10, 2015 at 12:40

  2. Tosh "Did he just say that?"

    February 10, 2015 at 12:41

    “It’s all go to do with the fact that their unified platforms.”
    It’s all *got to do with the fact that *they’re unified platforms.

    My eyes were burning. #SorryNotSorry

    Reply

    • Exalted Overlord Geoffrey Tim

      February 10, 2015 at 12:53

      Oh my fuck. dunno how that got in there. #shame

      Reply

      • Tosh "Did he just say that?"

        February 10, 2015 at 12:55

        It’s a conspiracy. Grammar is out to get everyone. If you don’t keep vigilant, it will eat you’re babies.

        😉

        Reply

        • Sir Captain Senior the First

          February 10, 2015 at 16:55

          Your* XD *flies away*

          Reply

          • R1ker

            February 10, 2015 at 17:42

            XD

          • Tosh "Did he just say that?"

            February 10, 2015 at 19:07

            *fly’s away

      • Admiral Chief

        February 10, 2015 at 13:02

        It is because I’m not at the office to help you, that is why

        Reply

      • Mossel

        February 10, 2015 at 13:58

        That’s what she said?

        Reply

        • Tosh "Did he just say that?"

          February 10, 2015 at 14:03

          LOL! How did I miss that? XD

          Reply

          • Sir Captain Senior the First

            February 10, 2015 at 16:54

            Your* XD

  3. Tosh "Did he just say that?"

    February 10, 2015 at 12:44

    On another note, that GTX 980 is crazy far ahead of the R9 290x. Wonder how the new flagship 300 series is going to fare.

    Reply

    • Spaffy

      February 10, 2015 at 13:19

      What you mean? The blerry 750ti is far ahead, if judged by the graph

      Reply

  4. Admiral Chief

    February 10, 2015 at 12:46

    BLIKSEM!

    Reply

  5. Admiral Chief

    February 10, 2015 at 12:46

    I’ll laugh my ass off if the EierDoos outperforms the PeeEssFawr

    Reply

    • Tosh "Did he just say that?"

      February 10, 2015 at 12:47

      Sony fanboys will be PeeEss’d off. 😛

      Reply

      • Admiral Chief

        February 10, 2015 at 12:47

        Can you imagine the lulz? Oh my word

        Reply

        • Hammersteyn

          February 10, 2015 at 12:50

          They need to hurry up with the slim line edition too. I want to get my Halo on. Once they fixed it.

          Reply

          • Admiral Chief

            February 10, 2015 at 12:53

            Slimline EierDoos = Micro ATX PC?

          • Hammersteyn

            February 10, 2015 at 12:54

            Won yours yet?

          • Admiral Chief

            February 10, 2015 at 13:00

            Not sure actually…

    • Hammersteyn

      February 10, 2015 at 12:47

      XD

      Reply

    • Jaded_Reprobate

      February 10, 2015 at 12:50

      i can feel my rage building

      Reply

    • Ghost In The Rift

      February 10, 2015 at 14:31

      With DX12 will the Xbox one hit 1080p?

      Reply

      • Admiral Chief

        February 10, 2015 at 15:41

        LOOOL

        Reply

  6. Admiral Chief

    February 10, 2015 at 12:48

    I’M ASTUTE!!! GEOFF SAID SO!

    Reply

    • Tosh "Did he just say that?"

      February 10, 2015 at 12:50

      You’re a mare? O_O

      “Stute

      Stu•te f , -, -n mare”

      German > English, in case you were wondering.

      Reply

  7. Raptor Rants A Lot:Original #7

    February 10, 2015 at 13:48

    I’m cautiously optimistic about this.

    Low level access will naturally give better performance but if one looks at what the mantle tests did in a test environment compared to real world it was like night and day. Real world performance was far less.

    i see the same happening with DX12. It will be a little better, but not 600% better

    Reply

  8. Mossel

    February 10, 2015 at 13:57

    What about ye olde 560ti? Any gains there?

    Reply

    • Raptor Rants A Lot:Original #7

      February 10, 2015 at 14:13

      All hardware should in theory gain something

      Reply

    • WitWolfy

      February 10, 2015 at 14:32

      So even my shitty GTX 650 will gain something? Nice…

      Reply

  9. FoxOneZA

    February 10, 2015 at 14:10

    DX12 < Mantle :p

    Reply

  10. Pieter Kruger

    February 10, 2015 at 14:13

    “and that Sony’s tweaking its SDK and APIs to allow for similar gains” Please make it so, then at least Sony can stop feeding the ponies all the cinematic look & feel crap and maybe even avoid a couple of lawsuits! ????

    Reply

    • L337J1MB0B

      February 10, 2015 at 16:57

      LULZ… a Xbox fanboy chirping the PS4’s hardware capabilities.. oh Internet how you amuse me each day!

      Reply

      • Pieter Kruger

        February 10, 2015 at 20:08

        Oh sorry, I forgot all PS4 games are 1080p 60fps……oh wait! See you still happily feeding at the bullshit trough though, eat up! ????

        Reply

        • Mark Treloar

          February 10, 2015 at 20:26

          Right because Xbox has all those 1080p games right.?

          Reply

          • Pieter Kruger

            February 11, 2015 at 09:04

            No, but Xbox didn’t make a issue out of it like Sony did! Now Sony is forced to use lower frame rates or “cinematic views” (cough cough!) ROFL! Anyway, even a 30% performance boost for exclusive games is huge! Sony will have to tweak the life out of their API and soon!????

  11. simplemindedgenius36

    February 10, 2015 at 14:18

    Obviously the reason the Xbox one was designed with its amazing cooling solution. Even if sony are working on improvements to their sdk and api i feel the design of the ps4 doesn’t allow for any more thermal headroom. We will see.

    Cant wait for GDC and E3

    Reply

  12. WitWolfy

    February 10, 2015 at 14:32

    I’ll believe it when I see it… I never fall for hype anymore.

    Reply

  13. Kikmi

    February 10, 2015 at 14:42

    *Checks MS stock price*
    *Checks Geoffs new fancy Lambo*
    *Laughs maniacally*

    Reply

  14. Kikmi

    February 10, 2015 at 14:43

    Also, can we just lol at the fact that a sub 2k card (750) trumps a 10k card (R290)

    Reply

  15. Mark Treloar

    February 10, 2015 at 16:44

    Is it my imagination or does AMD really suck with DX11

    Reply

  16. Eurpapi

    February 10, 2015 at 19:21

    Small thing that doesn’t really matter… If something doubles it’s a 100% increase, if it triples it’s a 200% increase and so on. That being said, Team Red saw about a 500% increase in performance.

    Reply

  17. Pops

    February 11, 2015 at 04:38

    Sony has been very quiet lately.they know it’s about to go down.the bad part about everything is if they haven’t started tweaking thier API yet.its going to take them another 3years.

    Reply

  18. Shaun Collins

    February 11, 2015 at 05:01

    Hi,

    whats the chance this directx 12 will make any difference to games that are already out?

    crysis 3 or skyrim(dx9) are ones I hope to see performance from.

    or will we see only benefits in new direct x 12 games?

    Reply

    • Nighterlev

      February 12, 2015 at 11:55

      Well, with games that are already out, you’ll see small improvements in them. Not big improvements like with all the new games, but a bit small, mostly dealing with FPS allowing the game to run even better then before.

      Reply

  19. Ershell Franklin

    February 11, 2015 at 10:44

    Dx12 will increase cpu in Xbox One up to 50%… That’s what was stated at the conference.

    Reply

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