We know by now that Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API set to be released as part of Windows 10 will bring significant performance improvements in games, which is mainly thanks to the low-level API granting game developers more control over the graphics cards in PCs, but it seems DirectX 12 has more to it than that.
According to AMD, DirectX 12 will finally unlock the true potential of multi-core CPUs. The semiconductor giant cited Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock who pointed out that with DirectX 11 and older, no matter how many processing cores your CPU has, only one of them can talk to the GPU at a time. In a recent interview, Wardell reportedly claimed that neither Microsoft, AMD, or Intel are ready to acknowledge that DirectX 11 was extremely inept at utilizing multi-core CPUs, and that is finally changing with DirectX 12.
“I’ve had a lot of meetings with Microsoft, AMD, and a little bit of NVIDIA and Intel – they really need to hit home the fact that DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, allow all of the cores of your CPU to talk to the video card simultaneously. But everyone’s really iffy about that, because that means acknowledging that for the past several years, only one of your cores was talking to the GPU, and no one wants to go ‘You know by the way, you know that multi-core CPU? It was useless for your games.’” – Brad Wardell
Presentation slides from AMD have been released that compare the differences in multi-core CPU utilization with DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, and the results are clear. The company states that because of better CPU and GPU management, DirectX 12 will “allow for new game designs previously considered impossible due to technical limitations of past DirectX APIs”.
Considering all the hype that Microsoft, NVIDIA, and AMD have been fueling around DirectX 12, they know that they will have to deliver, so we should expect to see truly impressive advancements in graphics capabilities on all DirectX 12-capable machines, including PCs, mobile devices and consoles in the near future.
