Microsoft: DirectX 12 to deliver 20 percent overall performance boost

Sounds like a nice cheap graphics card upgrade to me ! Microsoft developers stated the upcoming DirectX 12 API could deliver an up-to 20 percent higher frame rate in games and a decrease in CPU utilization.As a PC gamers we think you guys will upgrade Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system real fast :)

During an Intel press conference at GDC Wednesday night, Bryan Langley, a principal program manager for graphics with Microsoft, put it into context.

"This is like getting free hardware," Langley said. "So if you're a gamer, and you upgrade to Windows 10, and you have that Iris Pro, it's like getting that extra kick. It may make your game go from not quite playable, to playable, from mediocre to awesome, from awesome to just out of this world."

That's a powerful argument for any PC gamer to upgrade to Windows 10. So far, Microsoft has given no indication whether or not DirectX 12 will also be made available for Windows 7, but it's unlikely. And with Microsoft providing Windows 10 as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8 for a year after its release, it's hard to argue against upgrading.

McMullen said that Microsoft believes that Windows 10's DirectX 12 will run on about 50 percent of all gaming PCs today, and that it will "have two-thirds hardware coverage" by this Christmas.

McMullen used the same Intel "Asteroids" benchmark in his presentation Wednesday, but demonstrated that the frame rate increased a more modest 20 percent. But the CPU consumption also fell from 25 percent to 9 percent as DirectX 12 asked the GPU to shoulder more of the workload. The demonstration ran on an Intel Core i7 4770R (with Iris Pro graphics 5200 installed), but McMullen didn't indicate whether Nvidia cards, for example, would see a greater improvement than hardware for AMD.

DX11 ran the demo with 29FPS

Switching to DX12 - the framerate more then doubles @ 75FPS. CPU usage was increased.

Via bindless mode, DX12 can pre-bake all the textures used by the asteroids, thus offering a slight performance boost (79FPS). In case you’re not aware of, DX12’s “bindless resources” is a major efficiency improvement in how the GPU is running, making sure it’s not stalling waiting for the CPU to tell it about some of the changes that are needed.

Via Execute Indirect, Intel’s Asteroids demo ran with almost 90FPS. What’s really great here, however, is that the CPU usage was reduced significantly, meaning that more CPU intense scenarios will be possible via this rendering method.

Internal Intel benchmarks obviously are not real world representation of performance improvements to all PC configurations. But yeah, this is looking really good. The overall message was a simple one, however: if you're a gamer, you'll want to upgrade to Windows 10 and DirectX 12.