DirectX 12 showed promising potential in early benchmarks, but gamers remained skeptical as always when it comes to benchmarks compared to real games. Actual results in the first game to support DX12 show a significant increase in frame rates of up to 30%.
Ashes of the Singularity, developed by Stardock is an RTS game in the Starcraft era, it is the first PC game to market to officially support the new DX12 low-level API built into Windows 10. In a recent review published by PC Perspective which compared the performance of Ashes of the Singularity running on DX12 vs DX11, improvements were witnessed on both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards.
As evident in the charts below, gamers with AMD graphics cards in particular are in for a massive performance improvement. Less so on NVIDIA cards as they performed better on DX11 to begin with, resulting in much smaller gains with DX12. The cards in question are the AMD Radeon R9 390X and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, both are high-end models, but both companies offer even higher-end cards. We’re yet to see what performance will be like on the Radeon R9 Fury X and the GeForce Titan X.
It is also clear that performance drops only slightly as the number of CPU cores decrease, so DX12 seems to be doing a good job at offloading CPU tasks to the GPU. But, looking at it from another perspective, it also means that there is only a slight performance improvement as CPU cores increase, which may disappoint gamers that invested heavily in high-end CPU parts.
What is most important though, is that DX12 actually performs, and can make games previously unplayable on certain devices, playable. DX12 made its debut on PCs running Windows 10, and will soon make its way to other devices running Microsoft’s latest operating system, including the Xbox One, and possibly future Windows phones with compatible graphics chips.
What are your thoughts on DX12, are you happy with its results in Ashes of the Singularity? Do you think it has potential? Let us know in the comments section below.
