DirectX 12: Ushering In A New Era Of PC Gaming

[DeathFromBelow]

Once I realized all the DirectX hype was just Windows 10 advertising I lost interest.

 

[Snooble]

It seems to me like this is a "Buy Radeon since it supports DX12 on Windows 10"

Since I'm not a rich playboy, and I have to pass all purchases past my maste...wife, how will DX12 affect the current run of graphics cards on Windows 10? Not everybody is running a 9xx series NVidia, or what the hell the Radeon version is.

 

[Chimpee]

He is a substantial Moron as well.
https://youtu.be/dmyy7Tk-GBs?t=226 Listen to what he says vs what is quoted on the video.

That is why i really hate listening to AMD when they send one their idiots to talk about something, they claim to be a technical marketing but are just dumb.

Seriously, but what is worse are reading the comments on the video shows how much blind loyalty there are. Dumb fanboys thinking DX12 will magically increase their framerate is laugable without realizing the underlying difficulty of programming low-level API.

 

[chenw]

Once I realized all the DirectX hype was just Windows 10 advertising I lost interest.

A lot of that hype is based on a lack of understanding of how any version of DX (not just 12) works. I think the main hype going for DX12 was the VRAM stacking and Multi-colour GPU configurations. But I immediately noticed that DX12 only allows that do be done for game developers to take advantage of, rather than magically allowing all existing games under the sun to take advantage of.

I was skeptical of DX12 from the very start. The VRAM sounds too good to be true, and the multi-colour GPU setup only requires one side to disable its own drivers if it detects GPU from the/another side to be ruined. nVidia already have done it with their PhysX, and I don't see them stopping just at PhysX.

This is why I am not in a terrible rush to get Win 10, it will be a while before we fully see what DX12 is truly capable of, and by then I most likely would have upgraded my GPUs again, which would improve DX12 support anyways. That and I found out my Win 7 isn't available for free upgrade, it's Enterprise.

 

[Nytegard]

Ports are being outsourced because just developing the game on one platform now takes so much damn resources. Look at game credits: thousands and thousands of names for an 8 hour campaign.

To be fair, only a few of those names are actual programmers. The majority are people who contribute to the game, but in terms of assets and not development.

 

[c3141hf]

The big takeaways which were already known are this:

1. DX11 can only use a single thread to send commands to the GPU
2. DX12 can use multiple threads (slides showed up to 8, but I am guessing it could use more)
3. DX11 is very high overhead
4. DX12 is low overhead
5. DX12 drawcalls/s possible is way higher - current benches show around a 15x higher number of drawcalls vs DX11.
6. Split Frame Rendering in SLI and CF configurations. Supposedly this will speed things up a lot.

And the Playstation 4's GNM has had all of these features (minus SLI obviously) from the beginning.

Microsoft once again is late to the party.

 

[Mr. Bluntman]

I wouldn't count on that. UE4 is having DX12 support added to it.

Well, look at all the games that used UE3.x. That supported DX10, and later DX11 and how many games used those features? Not many. Gears of War was DX10, and it only used that to use anti-aliasing support.

 

[tetris42]

Seriously, but what is worse are reading the comments on the video shows how much blind loyalty there are. Dumb fanboys thinking DX12 will magically increase their framerate is laugable without realizing the underlying difficulty of programming low-level API.

I listened to one podcast where the manager of one of the games they're talking about (Ashes of The Singularity) states how while DX12 is amazing, it's going to do basically nothing for existing DX11 games. The game has to be written to take advantage of it. There's too many people who think that just converting a DX11 game to DX12 will boost the framerate, not sure where that rumor is coming from.

 

[ccityinstaller]

I listened to one podcast where the manager of one of the games they're talking about (Ashes of The Singularity) states how while DX12 is amazing, it's going to do basically nothing for existing DX11 games. The game has to be written to take advantage of it. There's too many people who think that just converting a DX11 game to DX12 will boost the framerate, not sure where that rumor is coming from.

I would take "smoothness" over an increased frame rate any day...I guess the technical term would be lower frame times, or consistent frame times...using my sig rig (GPU has a 35% OC) I can run every game I play right at 50-60fps, but DX11 games make me motion sick a lot, where the few Mantle games I played were the opposite...I thought it was just a placebo until I had a buddy set up BF4 without me knowing which API I was using..

As for those bitching about MS using DX 12 as marketing for Win10, what the hell do you expect them to do when you NEED Win10 to use DX12 thanks to their decision not to backport it to their largest user base out there on 7?

 

[Terpfen]

To be fair, only a few of those names are actual programmers. The majority are people who contribute to the game, but in terms of assets and not development.

Asset creation is still development.

 

[zone74]

The big takeaways which were already known are this:
1. DX11 can only use a single thread to send commands to the GPU

Except Microsoft claim that there is multi-threading support, and NVIDIA are somehow taking advantage of multi-threading.
Sure, the performance gains may not be as significant as moving to DX12 or Mantle/Vulkan, but it is more than a 2x improvement.
AMD seem to be sending out this message because their drivers cannot do it, rather than DX11 not being able to do it.

AMD seem to be very eager to move on to DX12/Vulkan rather than working on their DX11 performance.
Sorry, but there are no DX12 games out there, and DX11 performance matters as long as DX11 titles still exist.

Once I realized all the DirectX hype was just Windows 10 advertising I lost interest.

The more I read about Windows 10, the more I want to make the switch away from Windows to Linux for desktop usage to be honest.
But I'd probably have to build a second rig. Though there may now be "thousands of games" on Linux via SteamOS, most of the games I want to play still come to Windows first, or only get released on Windows.

 

[polonyc2]

the fact that DX12 is being supported by really old GPU's is still amazing to me...first time in DX history that you don't need to buy a new GPU...supposedly even Nvidia Fermi GPU's will support DX12