First look at directx 12 benchmark results
When Windows 10 launched on July 29th, it also heralded the arrival of DirectX 12. Microsoft, AMD and Nvidia have been touting the API's benefits for months now, saying it would be up to 20 percent faster and act like a free hardware upgrade for PC gamers. But is it truly faster than DirectX 11?
Sadly, we'll have to wait a bit longer to get the full story, since there aren't any DirectX 12 games that'll ship before the end of 2015. However, today we can report on the results of one test that uses an actual real-world game engine: Stardock shared with us an alpha DX12 test build of its upcoming RTS game, Ashes of the Singularity. It supports both DirectX 12 and older versions of DirectX (depending on your hardware), which allowed us to test both DX11 and DX12 on the same system back-to-back.
Before we get to the numbers, keep in mind that this is a test build that is labeled as "pre-beta," so things could change by the time it reaches its final stage. Also, if you're not familiar with the buzz surrounding DX12, the main reason it’s causing a stir is because it has several new features designed to boost gaming performance over DX11 (in addition to visual improvements). First, it will allow a much lower-level of hardware optimization for developers, so they can get a bit “closer to the metal” as opposed to being limited by the type of high-level optimizations found in DirectX 11. Second, it should be better able to dish orders to multi-core CPUs, which should allow the CPU to be less of a bottleneck in most scenarios.
DX12 will also at some point in the future allow GPUs from different manufacturers to work together, such as integrated Intel graphics and a discrete GPU. (We highly doubt it will ever be possible to run an Nvidia GPU and an AMD GPU together though, so don't get your hopes up for that.) Also, it’s unclear at this time how this technology will be implemented, and how it will affect performance. When DirectX 12 games land, your results will vary based on your hardware and the game in question, so don’t take anything you read and assume it'll apply to your setup. For these tests, we used a reference Nvidia GTX 980 Ti GPU on an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU running the latest Nvidia 355.60 drivers.
Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark
DX11 DX12 All Batches (avg) 49.9 55.66 Normal Batch (avg) 66.53 66.96 Medium Batch (avg) 53.2 56.1 Heavy Batch (avg) 38.1 47.36
3DMark API Overhead Test (Draw Calls/Second)
DirectX 11 Single-thread 1,451,281
DirectX 11 Multi-thread 2,676,439
DirectX 12 16,258,170
As you can see from the charts, there actually was a decent boost in performance going from DX12 to DX11, so maybe we can believe some of the marketing boasts. We saw just a small bump in the Normal and Medium batch runs, but a large improvement in the Heavy batches, which Stardock says is the best for measuring DX12 performance since it is the most stressful. In our tests we got a 20 percent improvement in framerate running the Heavy batch in DX12 (versus DX11), so it sounds like Microsoft was right on the money with its prediction. This is quite impressive since the only thing that changed between tests was the API.
Even more notable were the scores delivered in the 3DMark API Overhead test, where the number of draw calls went from 2.6 million using DirectX 11 to over 16 million with DirectX 12. That's crazy, but since this is purely a synthetic test, it's difficult to say whether it would actually boost framerates by the same margin in a shipping title. We'll have to wait for the holidays, when DX12 titles begin to arrive, to find that out.
Overall, DirectX 12 is looking pretty sweet at this early stage, and it adds extra incentive for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users to take advantage of their free upgrade to Windows 10. If you’re wondering whether your GPU supports DX12, as long as it’s a GCN-based Radeon 7000 or newer card you’re good to go. If you’re rocking an Nvidia card, everything from Fermi onward is supported, meaning GTX 400, 500, 600, 700, and 900 series will work just fine.
Source: IGN
