WHY IS DIRECTX 12 IMPORTANT FOR GAMERS?
One of the most exciting things to come along with Windows 10 rolling out later this year will be the release of DirectX 12 during the 2015 holiday season. DirectX 12 will unlock next-generation graphics for games that utilize new game engines like Unity, CryENGINE, and Unreal Engine 4.
With the rollout of Windows 10, DirectX 12 will replace the seven-year old DirectX 11, which currently commands 70% of the PC gaming market. While we have yet to see games that are built ground up on DirectX 12, it is expected that these games will hit the market as soon as the end of 2015.
In anticipation for the Windows 10 rollout, and, in turn, the arrival of DirectX 12, here's a snapshot of what to expect from the next-generation API.
More Draw Calls, More Power
One of the hallmark features of DirectX 12 will be its ability to simultaneously allow CPUs to send multiple commands to the GPU, significantly reducing the bottleneck that DirectX 11 suffers from.
Working with Nvidia® and AMD, Microsoft has developed DirectX 12 to benefit not only high-end performing machines that use high-memory dedicated graphics cards, but also mid- to low-tier computers that may feature integrated graphics.
To understand how this bottleneck is reduced, it's necessary to describe how a computer displays graphics in the first place. Graphics are displayed on your monitor by processes that are known as draw calls. A draw call is a command that your CPU gives to your GPU, effectively telling your GPU to "draw" whatever the command calls for.
Depending on the game and on your graphics settings, the number of these draw calls are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, per second. The problem with current-generation APIs like DirectX 11 is that these commands can only be sent one at a time, which creates a bottleneck in the communication channel between the CPU and the GPU.
What DirectX 12 promises to do is allow multiple CPU cores to simultaneously communicate with your GPU, which in turn allows for much larger and complex workloads. In short, DirectX 12 allows for more draw calls to be performed in a second than DirectX 11, boosting the performance of almost any given CPU and GPU.
So How Many More Draw Calls Are We Talking About?
Futuremark, a company that makes the popular benchmarking software 3DMark, has updated its software to allow users to synthetically compare DirectX 12's performance to the previous API by rendering a scene in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 and measuring how many draw calls per second were made.
According to several testers, DirectX 12 was able to produce up to a 1,200 percent increase in draw calls, significantly improving the performance of both powerful graphics cards like the Titan X as well as older graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 770.
By reducing the bottleneck between the CPU and the GPU, DirectX 12 is poised to improve framerates in DirectX 11 games by up to 20%, which is a big deal when considering the demands that next-generation video game engines place on the hardware.
While the 3DMark tests look incredibly promising, it's important to keep in mind that these are synthetic tests, and we won't get official benchmarks until testers can get their hands on the final product, likely to be sometime around the 2015 Holiday season. That being said, if in-game performance matches what the preliminary tests show, we're in for a real treat.
Do I Need to Upgrade My Computer to Take Advantage of DirectX 12?
Perhaps the best part about DirectX 12 is the GPU manufacturer support for older graphics cards. Nvidia has said that it will provide DirectX 12 support for all GPUs in the Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell families, meaning that if you have a GPU as old as the 400 series GeForce GTX card, you're good to go.
Likewise, AMD has confirmed that it will provide DirectX 12 support for all GPUs that feature the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, meaning all GPUs starting with the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series are good to go.
For road warriors that use Intel or AMD-based integrated graphics cards, there's some good news for you too: according to initial tests, there were significant performance gains of up to 230% for integrated graphics cards.
Unless you're rocking a pre-2010 rig, it's very likely that you're going to be able to immediately reap the benefits of DirectX 12, and it's likely it won't cost you a penny since Windows 10 will be free for many current owners of either Windows 7 or Windows 8.
