We’ve talked a lot about DirectX 12 over the past few months. The low-level graphics API will do wonders in terms of increasing the performance of existing graphics cards (and CPUs!), but we haven’t really had the chance to try it out ourselves. Well now we can!
Futuremark, the creators of popular PC gaming benchmarking app 3DMark, has recently released the 3DMark API Overhead feature test which marks the first publicly available DirectX 12 application. To run it, you will need the latest version of the Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10041) and the latest graphics drivers from Windows Update. That last part is important as the latest driver updates downloaded from the AMD and NVIDIA websites do not support DirectX 12 yet. You must also install the latest version of 3DMark Advanced or Professional Edition. Check out the system requirements list below.
- The DirectX 12 test requires a PC running an up-to-date version of Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10041 or later), 4 GB of system memory, and DirectX feature level 11_0 compatible hardware with at least at least 1 GB of graphics memory.
- The Mantle test requires 4 GB of system memory and AMD hardware that supports the Mantle API.
- The DirectX 11 test requires DirectX feature level 11_0 compatible hardware with at least 1 GB of graphics memory and 4 GB of system memory.
Give it a try and let us know if the preliminary results DirectX 12 currently achieves lives up to all the hype. Read the rest of our DirectX 12 coverage here.
Further reading: 3DMark, Benchmark, DirectX 12, Gaming, Microsoft
