Last month at the Game Developer’s Conference, Microsoft unveiled DirectX12, and with the annoucnement, the promise that the Xbox One would benefit in performance gains. Now, developers are coming out to reiterate on these claims, the latest being Stardock founder and CEO Brad Wardell.
In a post on Neowin, Wardell explains the “Secret Sauce” behind the DirectX12 performance gains on the Xbox One.
It effectively gives every Xbox One owner a new GPU that is twice as fast as the old one
“The results are spectacular,” writes Wardell. “Not just in theory but in practice (full disclosure: I am involved with the Star Swarm demo which makes use of this kind of technology.) While each generation of video card struggles to gain substantial performance over the previous generation, here, the same hardware will suddenly see a doubling of performance.
XBox One is the biggest beneficiary; it effectively gives every Xbox One owner a new GPU that is twice as fast as the old one.”
Though these performance gains do come at price, warns the developer.
“There is a downside for all this power. DirectX 12 games will be the first games to fully utilize the powerful graphics cards gamers have been buying for the past few years. DirectX 12 won’t require a new video card for GPUs that already support DirectX 11. As a result, that GPU will be getting pushed twice as hard as it previously was which means more heat on cards that might have only barely been cool enough when they were only being commanded by a single CPU core. We expect to see many marginal video cards setup to experience over heating issues as DirectX 12 suddenly pushes these cards beyond what the IHV had anticipated.”
Microsoft has yet to provide an official release date for DirectX12.
