DirectX 12 Will Result Into Free Performance Gains, Microsoft Taking A Unifying Step With The API

Charles Cox, the founder of 4gency has been following Microsoft's API, DirectX for a long time. Right from the DirectX 3 days, Charles has been keeping tabs on how the API has evolved in the last so many years.

[Foehammer]

Good to hear.

Just like all the previous generations, the games will look better and better as time goes on.

[mrpsychoticstalker]

Which such a strong lineup in the next upcoming months. Graphics is the less I am worried about. need time and money to get all those amazing games. Forza sunset. Mcc. Etc

[cruzngta]

Agreed. Time and money is the real issue. Just picked up Destiny, warriors orichi3, diablo 3 and metro redux for my xb1. All great games and my library is now up to 18 games. Next up is Horizon 2, Sunset OD, COD Advanced Warfare and of course Halo MCC. Its going to be one hell of a good fall season 4 me and many others. Sunset OD is the game I have been willing to raid a third world country for - gonna be up many late nights playing the hell out of that game. That is my kind of game and reminds me alot of the first crackdown and saints row.

[XBLSkull]

Halo and AC on the same day- then Dragon Age, GTA and Far Cry all on the same day a week later? Why the F do they do that to us? How about one of those games every 2 months throughout the year?

[ABizzel1]

Forget 2014, 2015 is death of a wallet.

[avengers1978]

The year of the broke gamer... For sure

[Clunkyd]

It's not an issue if you set money on the side to save up for times like these. Money management, buddy :)

[BX81]

@clunk
You have to consider some people have kids, bills, and real world issues to deal with not just teenage problems. I'm fortunate enough to have all those issues and still have money to pick up when I want but I'm not the majority. Money management for most adults isn't video games. It's food and bills.

[cruzngta]

What this all means in layman's terms : 'Da Secret Sauce is a comin.........' Takes time 2 cook thats all. I am sure this will imrpove performance for the XB1 and that will help with the whole 1080p/esram problems that some devs had. XB1 is a unique machine and as time goes by it has just been getting better. This will push it over the top.

[wynams]

so ... sorta like teh cloud only different?

[DragoonsScaleLegends]

Why do articles keep getting posted saying they have pushed the performance further? With the amount of gains they have said it would make you think that it now has superior hardware to the PS4 when it simply doesn't. But I am interested in getting an XO due to the exclusive games it will be getting but my PS4 will still be my go to for multiplayer and third party games. I got a Wii U for exclusives and I'm loving it so far.

[IcicleTrepan]

But it's not Microsoft saying any of these things.

[WilDRangeRfc]

I have both Xbox Live hands down is the best this weeks PSN issues prove that and the Lizard Squad attack,multiplayer Xbox PS4 for single player and exclusives,I pay for PSN and Live and have not stopped playing TLOUR online ( when there aren't issues signing in etc )

[DragoonsScaleLegends]

I have had PSN for years and have only had issues a few times. Once when it was hacked years ago and now with the recent events. These were the only times I ever had issues unexpectedly. Has Xbox Live never gone down in it's whole life? I doubt it but everthing gets screwed over and PSN seems like the go to for hate.

[hello12]

The x box 1 will not be more powerful than the PS4 with this and its not a game changer for resolution. Two things not fully understood.

Its not going to solve the 1080p for every game in the future. You can run any game at 1080p and 60 frames on xb1 and PS4 and you can do that on PC, its been done for years, but the problem for devs they're trying to have both high end graphics and 1080p and 60 frames at the same time. You sometimes have to sacrifice one or the other on console due to limitations of the specifications.

Directx12 main benefits will be improving graphic texturing and shading and improving frame rate for games. How much of a performance gain for xb1 especially with frame rate can only be a guess at this time, but i bet we will see an improvement.

But, like i said. PS4 will always be better for resolution and perhaps will always have the slight edge in graphics. The PS4 performance is greatly overestimated if you dig deep into the specs and figure out what the devs are using to develop games. The PS4 is roughly 10 to 15 per cent more powerful not 50 per cent, the reason for that is devs prefer balance Multi-core processors have inherent inefficiency with more CU's. Even a playstation DEV admitted the PS4 uses a 14+4 setup.

Meaning it uses 14 for graphics and 4 for compute and other things. 18 in total

X BOX 1 only had 14, but can only use 12 because they need to use the other CU's for audio.

[Illusive_Man]

You're right the new XDKs are already improving the resolution and graphical parity. Dx12 is just icing on the cake.You ever thought there might be more to the X1 than what you hear on a gaming website?

[WilDRangeRfc]

Your spot on the people disagreeing don't have both I do about 15% Max

[MrSec84]

What you've said about PS4's performance difference compared to Xbox One isn't even remotely true.
For starters no developer has said PS4 uses a 14+4 CU set-up, that was something Sony considered before PS4 was announced, they ended up giving devs access to 18CUs so they can use them all how they choose.

Sony didn't want to limit developers by making them use 4 CUs for Compute tasks and 14 for graphics, it's actually the case that the ACEs are like the threads of a CPU, devs can put commands in the Compute Queues (of which there are 64 in PS4 compared to 16 in Xbox One) to be dealt with during GPU down time, so if graphics tasks aren't being rendered then that's when devs take advantage of the Physics, AI or Audio Rendering features PS4 has.

PS4 also has a dedicated audio chip to.

As for your belief it's a 10-15% difference, you're completely wrong there too, the GPU has 100% more ROPs, so it's 100% more capable at filtering, Anti Aliasing passes, final rendering to the screen.
There are 50% more Compute Units, 50% more Texture Mapping Units and 4X the amount of ACEs in Xbox One.

With PS4's main memory being more than 3X faster than Xbox One's (8GBs of DDR3 at 55GB/s vs 8GBs of GDDR5 at 172GB/s in real world bandwidth, XB1 confirmed by Microsoft engineers, PS4 confirmed by Stewart Gilray) in the real world so devs can actually take advantage of the extra hardware in PS4.

ESRAM is tiny and still not as fast as GDDR5 in PS4.

There's more than a 40% difference in GPU power in PS4 based off of the difference in CUs and TMUs.
As I said before the speed of RAM and available size for storage, plus the ability to both read and write to GDDR5 in any cycle means that taking advantage of that extra power is much easier, the 50% difference in overall hardware performance is actually likely an understatement when you consider all of the extra tech PS4 has over Xbox One and how the system's more geared towards how developers will render everything game related in the future.

As for your comment on XB1 having 14 CUs, 14 are on the die, but only 12 are usable by the hardware, the other 2 are reserved as a redundancy, PS4 also has 20 CUs on die, but as with XBox One 2 are reserved for redundancy, it's a thing fabrication plants do to keep manufacturing yields up, so they make sure they've got enough working hardware.

[DougLord]

Who CARES? Bring the GAMES!! I looked at the side-by-sides for GTA PS3 vs PS4, and while there are noticeable differences, the game plays exactly the same. If increasing GPU power 8x from 1 gen to the next does nothing to make the game more fun to play, what is a 10% or 20% boost going to do??? Stop worrying about the PS4 being able to push a few extra pixels. Games are what matter.

[ARESWARLORD]

Agreed

[affrogamer]

"..will benefit non-DX 12 cards" So the PS4 will benefit from it too?

[OldDude]

Sorry but no. The X1 really was released before it was ready and was designed for DX12. It tiles resources in hardware and the PS4 does not. So no, DX12 will not help PS4. HOWEVER Sony will continue to update its drivers and API's so it will be receiving benefits from those as well.

Its really 6 of one, half a dozen of the other at the end of the day.

[MrSec84]

The idea that Xbox One was released before it was ready is completely unfounded and it makes zero sense because these systems are planned out for years before release, both systems have software improvements over time.

Both PS4 and Xbox One share the same GPU hardware, both can use the same features.
They both have 7000 series AMD GPU architecture, which carries the DX11 feature set.
DX just like GNM in PS4 is software, it's an API or Application Programmer Interface, if Sony wanted to use DX12 they can, simply by incorporating DX12 software into their API.

Since PS4 has an AMD 7000 series GPU it's got hardware based Tiled Resource technology built directly into it, it's called PRT or Partially Resident Textures, which allows for up to 32 Terabytes worth of textures data to be handled by the GPU without using a lot of GPU resoures.

Just like Tessellation and any hardware feature AMD built into their technology PS4 can use it.

Both PS4 and Xbox One will be optimized over time, so the level of growth will be relative, but PS4 is the more advanced system, featuring more modifications for GPU compute, with more compute queues, CUs and a much more efficient memory system.

Both systems are directly comparable in most areas, apart from their memory system, so all of these assumptions that Xbox somehow can make up for deficiency it has in the GPU and Memory system are completely unfounded, unless Microsoft were to come out and say they've lied from day one of announcing Xbox One's architecture and they haven't been taking advantage of the hardware to give Sony a head start.

It makes no logical sense.

[Kavorklestein]

You are so far off the map brotha. Ps4 uses a whole different api. It's a proprietary version of open gl. There is no way dx12 is going to help a system that uses Open Gl. When they make two versions of a game, one on XB1, and one on PS4- The xbox one version uses it modified version of directx 11+ (an upgradeable api) to draw and put up on a screen, and the PS4 uses it's version of open gl to draw and put pixels on the screen. Granted, there's more to it than just the api, such as available ram and cpu clock speeds, but for the sake of the language or API each machine uses, they are Direct X and Open Gl respectively.

If the PS4 was using a direct x based api, then yes, it would potentially help the PS4.
BUT- it DOESN'T use directx at ALL, so it will in no way, shape, or form help out the ps4.

Just like advancements using mantle will never help a directx machine like xbox one.

[Yaay4me]

didn't they say that the DX12 isn't going to be making much difference for the xbone? that it was mainly PC they were talking about

[PS4OUR]

That's what Phil Spencer said and many others. Performance of DX12 will be more beneficial to PC than Xbox One.

[headblackman]

that's not what he said. he said that it wouldn't be a massive change, meaning that it will be a nice size change, but nothing to the point of it being life changing. but enough to make it easy on the developers. so if it's enough for the developers, than surely it's enough for the gamers to be happy and or satisfied.

(hers the link to his comment) http://www.dualshockers.com...

[WilDRangeRfc]

Don't forget PS4 and X1 are PC,s just have custom GPU and the CPU is essentially of a PC architecture

[IVanSpinal]

aahhh silly Fanboys

[tlougotg]

Everytime i see these articles and fanboys lap it up i think "oh shut the @uck up, we already know the deal"

[gamernova]

I heard it was to help PC optimization but wouldn't help the Xbox. I hope Xbox does get better because of it. It needs a boost because of all the resolution issues articles keep bringing up about not being on part with the playstation. Not that resolution is everything but it's better to have for a more immersive experience in my opinion.

[Reddzfoxx]

Xbox one will get better textures and other things from the tools DX12 will bring.

Both consoles already do native 1080p gaming its just one console needs more time to iron out the wrinkles while the other was easy from the get go. DX12 will just allow better looking games with quite a bit more physics and objects in it.

PC's will benefit even more as they already have the power just the API isn't efficient as you can upgrade GPU's and Processors where as in a console you can't so console manufacturers have to optimize settings and textures among other things.

[PS4OUR]

"because all of a sudden resolution articles keep bringing up"

LOL. Are you serious? Where were you hiding when the PS3 and Xbox 360 launched? The same thing happened last generation. Digital Foundry and the media would pick apart the tiniest pixel difference between PS3 and Xbox 360 at every corner tech article, kinda like what's happening now. Google search is your friend if you want examples.

I have to lol at people that think resolution articles is a new thing. Of course last gen it was ok when 360 was trouncing PS3 on every multiplat. Suddenly resolution don't matter and its all about the games (which i agree with) but the flip flopping (especially from the XBox camp)is hilarious.

[gamernova]

I literally did not say the quote you displayed lol I never said it was new. I am just highlighting that several articles bring up the sub par resolution of the xbox so I definitely feel that it could use a boost. That's all lol If it helps you feel better, I hope the ps4 benefits of future firmware updates too lol I am not a console gamer but don't hate me for wanting gaming platforms to succeed :P

[urwifeminder]

Nice looking forward to seeing the gains on pc ,tablet and xboxone.