DirectX 12 tested: An early win for AMD and disappointment for Nvidia

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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). 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. 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. 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.

Enter Oxide Games' real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity, the very first publicly available game that natively uses DirectX 12. Even better, Ashes has a DX11 mode too. For the first time, we can make a direct comparison between the real-world (i.e. actual game) performance of the two APIs across different hardware. While earlier benchmarks like 3DMark's API Overhead feature test were interesting, they were entirely synthetic. 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.

What's so special about DirectX 12?

DirectX 12 features an entirely new programming model, one that works on a wide range of existing hardware. 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. Not every one of those graphics cards will support every feature of DirectX 12 though, because the API is split into different feature levels. These include extra features like Conservative Rasterization, Tiled Resources, Raster Order Views, and Typed UAV Formats.

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). But the good news is that the most important features of DirectX 12 are supported across the board. In theory, that means most people should see some sort of performance uplift when moving to DX12. 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.


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