The PC Gamer Weekender event is taking place right now and some interesting news has managed to slip out of it. According to the demo of Hitman being shown at the event, the game will support DirectX 12 fully at launch, a slide also lists the benefits of going with the latest API.
Thanks to DirectX 12, you can probably expect some better performance, thanks to better multithreading support and increased performance for CPU-bound instructions.
PC Gamer's slide image is a bit blurry but it confirms that Direct X 12 will bring:
- better multithreading
- increased performance where CPU bound
- better experiences for laptop gamers
- asynchronous compute on AMD cards for significant performance gains
- early days but we will continue expanding and improving on the Dx12 experience in future releases
The last bullet point likely means that other Square Enix owned studios will start using Direct X 12 for future games as well.
KitGuru Says: While we have known about Direct X 12 and its benefits for some time now, it is great to finally see games starting to support it. Are any of you planning on picking up Hitman next month?
I wonder how much dx12 will affect my huge bottleneck hd 7970 crossfire with fx 8120 4,5Ghz
Alright AMD, i am looking at you. Give me high butter-smooth FPS in DX12 and Vulcan games, and I shall buy your future GPUs.
Here is a link to an old article that shows CPU bottlenecks – just comparing the core count in DX12 vs. DX11. Basically it shows that a Core i3-4370 Dual Core will bottleneck a stock Nvidia GTX 980. If this is still the case then your CPU shouldn’t be even close to being CPU limited in any application for at least a few years of real DX12 titles. Your HD 7970’s on the other hand…
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8962/the-directx-12-performance-preview-amd-nvidia-star-swarm/4
Note: just pay attention to the first graph on this page, as most results from this benchmark are outdated and are considered wrong. AMD cards perform much better these days with DX12.
Like James wrote, I highly doubt your bottleneck comes from your CPU.
And DX12 doesn’t do miracles in GPU bound situation (there is still some gain when code take advantage of the lower level side of the api).
Hitman and its awful lot of NPC / AI (hard on the CPU) will probably benefit greatly from DX12.