![]() In the DX11 era, Nvidia was the undisputed king, but this is great news for AMD. Once a command list hits the GPU, it can then process all the commands in a parallel manner rather than having to wait for the next command in the chain to come through. The only serial process is the final submission of those command lists to the GPU, which is theoretically a highly efficient process. Because each command list is self-contained, the driver can pre-compute all the necessary GPU commands up-front and in a free-threaded manner across any CPU core. ![]() These bundle together commands needed to execute a particular workload on the GPU. In contrast, DX12 introduces command lists. And AMD has been particularly vocal about the performance of its new API, a move that's undoubtedly tied to its poor DX11 performance ( particularly on low-end CPUs) compared to Nvidia. In theory, that means most people should see some sort of performance uplift when moving to DX12. But the good news is that the most important features of DirectX 12 are supported across the board. Some of those features are interesting and very technical (I refer you to this handy glossary if you're interested in exactly what some of them do). These include extra features like Conservative Rasterization, Tiled Resources, Raster Order Views, and Typed UAV Formats. Not every one of those graphics cards will support every feature of DirectX 12 though, because the API is split into different feature levels. On the AMD side, that means any GPU featuring GCN 1.0 or higher (cards like the R9 270, R9 290X, and Fury X) are supported, while Nvidia says anything from Fermi (400-series and up) will work. What's so special about DirectX 12?ĭirectX 12 features an entirely new programming model, one that works on a wide range of existing hardware. Such tests only focused on the maximum number of draw calls per second (which allows a game engine to draw more objects, textures, and effects) achieved by each API. While earlier benchmarks like 3DMark's API Overhead feature test were interesting, they were entirely synthetic. actual game) performance of the two APIs across different hardware. Even better, Ashes has a DX11 mode too. For the first time, we can make a direct comparison between the real-world (i.e. There's literally been no way to test these touted features and see just what kind of performance uplift (if any) there is. Until now, that is.Įnter Oxide Games' real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity, the very first publicly available game that natively uses DirectX 12. Yet for all the Windows 10 information to trickle out in the three weeks since the OS launched, DX12 has remained the platform's most mysterious aspect. The promise of a graphics API that allows console-like low-level access to the GPU and CPU, as well as improved performance for existing graphics cards, is tremendously exciting. Windows 10 brings a slew of features to the table- the return of the Start menu, Cortana, the Xbox App-but the most interesting for gamers is obvious: DirectX 12 (DX12).
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