As you know game development is a very challenging task in terms of providing a good gaming experience for all the users. Even though there are lot of tools and game engines available to make game development much easier, still it’s very challenging task since there are many consoles and gaming platforms available, game developers have to adjust and develop game to give similar user experience in all these gaming consoles ang gaming platforms. The reason for this is because different consoles uses different hardware architectures and software API’s to deliver unique experience for their users, so. Game developers has to optimize the game for all these hardware configurations and provide similar gaming experience within the vast universe of processors, graphic cards and other hardware is very challenging.
What is direct X?
Direct x is a application programming interface that allows programmers to handle task rendering 2D and 3D graphics, rendering video like processes on windows platforms. Direct x ia used by majority of games that run on windows. Other major gaming API is OpenGl. During the introduction of direct x it didn’t take off as developers mostly relied on OpenGL the time and programmed efficiently in dos environment. With time, the direct x became more popular with the introduction of direct x 9. Now its been used across many platforms globally. With the arrival of windows 10, latest version of the direct x series, direct x 12 was released.
What is new in direct x 12?
There are some major improvements in new DirectX 12. See how they will affect your gaming experience.
Draw call overhead reduction
First, I will explain what is a draw call. Draw call is a request to the GPU to render out some 3d object or some graphic elated sk. Usually draw call are passed through the CPU on to the GPU. Draw call overhead means bottleneck due to the all the graphic rendering passed by the CPU to GPU. The the new features of the direct x 12 GPU will not be waiting for the CPU provide instruction on graphical rendering since all the graphical rendering since all the graphical rendering will transferred directly to the GPU before it reach the CPU. This will reduce extra workload of CPU and let GPU handle all the graphical rendering. Therefore, CPU limited games will have better performance with this feature.
DX12 multi GPU support
This new feature will allow games to work with multiple graphic processors of different brands and speed. Without using SLI or crossfire support. This feature support graphic cards as well as with integrated graphic cards. This only will add small amount of performance improvement, but this little amount of performance improvement is worth something other than leaving the hardware unused.
Platform optimization for programmers
One of the main new feature the direct x 12 is that, it greatly increases the developer’s ability to optimize their games for specific hardware. with new direct 3d offers lower level of hardware abstraction and reconfiguration of hoe the graphic pipeline is managed when compared to direct x 11 and previous versions.
Hardware abstraction means developers doesn’t need to program separately to deal with different hardware, instead they have to program in general and the API will deal with different hardware. Direct x 12 provide lower level of hardware abstraction, there for programmers can optimize performance for different hardware. This will lead to improve in performance of games in different platforms.
Does DX12 improve performance ?
How much a game benefits from direct x 12 depend on what kind of CPU your testing it on. How GPU limited your quality setting are, how much experience the developer has in API to start. Whether the it is developed to take advantage of DX12, or if its support for the API was patched in at a later date and the graphic hardware you are using have significant impact on the performance.
Performance test on Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU shows that AMD GPUs get advantage of DirectX 12 and show improvements on performance when compared to direct x 11 while NVidia GPUs performed better with direct x 12. But overall DirectX 12 give new features that will allow developers can take advantage of developing games that are optimized to different hardware in PC platforms. For some extent have manage to achieve this with DirectX 12.
