DirectX 12 : A Game changer ?

Imagine you’re browsing the internet and you come across this awesome new trailer of a game that’s about to come out. The trailer is so good that you can’t wait to try out the game. You pre-order the game and now you patiently wait for it to come out.After what seemed like an eternity, the big day finally arrived and you start downloading the 15 GB game. After 34 hours of downloading(welcome to India or Manipal’s ION to be exact), you install it and finally run it. The game starts up with a CGI video and it looks stunning. Heart beat rises. You’re being introduced to various aspects of the game with glimpses of the game-play. You start sweating. Loading screen comes up. You feel like you’re on the stairway to heaven. The game finally gives you control and….This is the best game you’ve ever played in your life? Nah. This was a good game but you’ve seen better? Not even close. Turns out your PC is not able to render the game at playable FPS.
Are you annoyed beyond belief? Well, you’re not alone, we know that feeling.

Read on.

What’s FPS?

It’s the abbreviation of Frames Per Second. It denotes the number of consecutive images which are displayed in a second. You at least require 30 fps for good experience.
Here is a comparison of different FPS.

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What can you do?

If you have a few bucks to spare, you can get a better experience by upgrading to a SSD(this decreases loading time), or upgrading your PC(ram, graphic card, etc.).

If not, well, though it’s a long shot there is some good news.

DirectX 12

If you have played your share of games you must have come across DirectX at least once.

What is DirectX?

Well windows defines it as a set of low-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provides Windows programs with high-performance hardware-accelerated multimedia support.
Simply put it has a lot to do with the graphics in your game as it’s the medium
between the program and your graphic card.

How is DirectX 12 going to make a difference?

DirectX 12 is introducing multi-adapter feature that allows discrete GPUs and integrated GPUs to work simultaneously . This won’t make any difference if your PC just has just this one integrated Intel HD graphic card but if your PC features two graphic cards say a discrete(or dedicated) Nvidia GPU and an Intel HD card , then both the graphic cards will be operating at the same time and there will be a definite performance boost.

With the help of four Nvidia GeForce Titan X GPUs and DirectX 12, Square Enix(game developer) was able to render 8k by 8k resolution. This had about 63 million polygons per scene. Every hair strand was a polygon on its own.

Well I have a laptop with just an integrated graphic card, am I out of luck?

Not exactly, Intel recently ran a demo which compared DirectX 11 and 12. When running DirectX 12 the device seemed to give a better performance while utilizing the same power as DirectX 11. It even utilized less power while delivering the same performance as DirectX 11. This is because DirectX 12 is better at distributing the work between different threads, and also reduces CPU load. DirectX 12 also tackles heat issues by decreasing the load.

Intel ran a test comparing DirectX 11 and 12. The following image shows the result.

So what’s the catch?

There are a lot actually.

• DirectX 12 is exclusive to Windows 10. Just when you thought you were getting comfortable with Metro. Windows 10 better be good. One can’t even consider the upgrade if their computer’s OEM doesn’t release the Windows 10 compatible drivers for their device.
• Just because you have installed DirectX 12 don’t expect your FPS to fly. The developer of a certain program has to rewrite that program utilizing the DirectX 12 API. Only then will you be able to experience the features of DirectX 12.
• Apparently coding with hyper-threading isn’t exactly a piece of cake. DirectX 12 gets complicated on the developer’s side.

Conclusion

Its still not clear how much of a difference DirectX 12 will make. However, in the long run it is pretty certain that this will have a huge effect on game rendering in PC’s and XBox. The fact that there will a huge bump in FPS should be taken with a grain of salt. However, if it turns out to be as promised, we just had a glimpse of future gaming

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-Sandeep