• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Not many games use dx 12, how is it?

fireflame

Member
Hello, i do not own any games taking advantage baout dx 12, and there arent that many that use it, so i wanted to ask people who played dx 12 compatible games how big the change was.

When Pascal Gpus were about to come, people said that dx12 had to be good because dx 11 was useless, and Nvidia stated dx 12 would be fully exploited with Pascal Gpus.

But so far i dont remmber many people recently praising dx 12. How good is dx 12 right now, and what does it bring?
 

Cartho

Member
Remember the early days of XB1, when MrXMedia was trying to tell everybody that DX 12 would make the Xbox One more powerful than a PS4 and that it was going to "solve the resolution problems" Xbox One was having? Fun times.
 

charsace

Member
People are still learning what they can do with it, at least I am. You could get away with being sloppy in DX11. You can't with DX12 and Vulcan.
 

c0de

Member
Hello, i do not own any games taking advantage baout dx 12, and there arent that many that use it, so i wanted to ask people who played dx 12 compatible games how big the change was.

When Pascal Gpus were about to come, people said that dx12 had to be good because dx 11 was useless, and Nvidia stated dx 12 would be fully exploited with Pascal Gpus.

But so far i dont remmber many people recently praising dx 12. How good is dx 12 right now, and what does it bring?
It is a challenge for devs as vulkan is. Adjusting yourself as a dev and to make best use of it in existing engines takes time.
 

Dynasty

Member
Which they gave out for free for over a year, and steam shows as being the single largest installed OS.
DX11 works on Window 7,8,10. Dx12 only works on W10. Even though W10 has a significant marketshare, they cant just ignore the others.
 

roytheone

Member
As someone with a old cpu (i7 870) but a good gpu (970) directx 12 is pretty great, it gives me way more stable framerates in pretty much all games. Even in games like hitman where people said it didn't do a lot I still got a pretty good boost.
 

Lister

Banned
As someone with a old cpu (i7 870) but a good gpu (970) directx 12 is pretty great, it gives me way more stable framerates in pretty much all games. Even in games like hitman where people said it didn't do a lot I still got a pretty good boost.

Yeah this is the most common pro for DX12 games - low end CPU's, especially AMD one's with lots of cores, tend to benefit most from it.

The handful of very CPU demanding PC only titles, also benefit, but it's hit or miss, with the developers needing to have the technical know how, or utilizing an engine that can leverage the API well.
 
It made a night and day difference for me in the 4K performance of Rise and the Tomb Raider. Before it was running sub-30 and choppy in some places and even causing crashes. After a solid 30 all the way through and smooth as a baby's butt.
 

Armorian

Banned
I don’t know if it’s something wrong with my PC but both games I tried DX12 on (ROTTR and Battlefront 2) had weird performance issues when I turned on DX12. Seems like the opppsite of what should have happened. I have a 1070 ti

Maybe I don’t have a driver loaded properly in windows?
 

Armorian

Banned
I don’t know if it’s something wrong with my PC but both games I tried DX12 on (ROTTR and Battlefront 2) had weird performance issues when I turned on DX12. Seems like the opppsite of what should have happened. I have a 1070 ti

Maybe I don’t have a driver loaded properly in windows?

Rise runs better to me in DX12 (maybe because my 2600k is old) but BF2 and most other DX12 titles runs worse, I have 1070. Many DX12 titles have better results on AMD cards but for example in BF2 all cards run worse in DX12 https://pclab.pl/art76239-5.html

Looks like getting Dx12 render to match speed of DX11 one is no easy task and and not worth it for many developers.
 
Last edited:

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Remember the early days of XB1, when MrXMedia was trying to tell everybody that DX 12 would make the Xbox One more powerful than a PS4 and that it was going to "solve the resolution problems" Xbox One was having? Fun times.

It was also the DEV Brad Wardell, who said ps4 and x1 would have graphics as good as lord of the rings cgi by the end of the gen, that never happened lol
 

Zoidbe

Neo Member
The problem with dx12 is that the memory management and general usage in code terms is much much harder to implement than dx11, I'm currently studying a masters degree in games software development and we have barely touched dx12. From what we have been told, it's a lot more difficult than dx11 and from my experience, I can tell you dx11 is hard enough as it is :)
 

Armorian

Banned
It takes time, first dx9 and dx11 games were also disappointing, with the exception of farcry 1 maybe.

Maybe it will take off with SM6 but i stil think majority of big titles (and almost all of small ones) will use DX11 in like ~3 years time.
 
Last edited:

Valdega

Member
DX12 is basically like DX10: limited adoption and minimal, if any, tangible benefits to players. Hopefully DX13 will be like DX11.
 

Swizzle

Gold Member
The problem with dx12 is that the memory management and general usage in code terms is much much harder to implement than dx11, I'm currently studying a masters degree in games software development and we have barely touched dx12. From what we have been told, it's a lot more difficult than dx11 and from my experience, I can tell you dx11 is hard enough as it is :)

Coding to the metal and doing away with big fat drivers does remove bugs out of your control, but you can still write bugs with code you do not fully understand as you delve into increased complexity (the price of more deterministic control).

It does make you appreciate the console developers who have been working like this for many years and had to make correct, working, fast code too, doesn’t it :)?
 

Aklamarth

Member
It does make you appreciate the console developers who have been working like this for many years
Last console where you "code to the metal/silicon" was PS2. After that you have high level APIs for everything, the only way to "interact" directly with the hardware was to write shaders (and in the case of PS3, write some assembly to optimize the code running specifically on the SPU ). These days developers fight with the complexity of making these huge games , nobody cares about squeezing a few extra frames out of the hw.
 

Allandor

Member
Window10 needs to gain more traction since DX12 is locked to that.
That has nothing to do with Windows 10, because they still could use Vulcan which is quite similar. But there are even less games that support Vulcan.
The problem is more, that is just more complicated to use than just the old standard. You can do many things wrong which just worked with the older techniques.

The other problem is the supporting hardware and it brings almost nothing to the table that is really relevant.
With a lowend PC the game might run better because of the cpu, but in most cases the gpu is still the bottleneck.
On a highend PC the game might run a bit better because the cpu is no longer the bottleneck, but the FPS are already so high that it doesn't matter (to the mass) if it runs with 60 or 80fps. Also most times just the min-fps are better. From a developer perspective it just doesn't make sense to implement proper DX12/Vulcan support if DX11/OpenGL is already running good enough. And Highend-PCs are not that common. Most customers have lowend to midrange pcs. To those customers it just matters if the game runs or not.

Well and than, yes, than there is the Windows 10 only thing.

As soon as the engines have a default DX12/Vulcan support we will get DX12 by default.
 

fourfourtwo

Neo Member
Remember the early days of XB1, when MrXMedia was trying to tell everybody that DX 12 would make the Xbox One more powerful than a PS4 and that it was going to "solve the resolution problems" Xbox One was having? Fun times.

I recall something about there being a secret second GPU in the power brick according to MrXMedia, that would totally out-muscle the PS4. What a crazy time. Makes me wish I was around for the rumours before the PS3/360 came out.
 

Allandor

Member
I recall something about there being a secret second GPU in the power brick according to MrXMedia, that would totally out-muscle the PS4. What a crazy time. Makes me wish I was around for the rumours before the PS3/360 came out.
after all the power brick had more power ;)
and yes dx12 helped a bit because before it wasn't that low level before. But that only helped because the gap was wider than it had to be.
 

Swizzle

Gold Member
Last console where you "code to the metal/silicon" was PS2. After that you have high level APIs for everything, the only way to "interact" directly with the hardware was to write shaders (and in the case of PS3, write some assembly to optimize the code running specifically on the SPU ). These days developers fight with the complexity of making these huge games , nobody cares about squeezing a few extra frames out of the hw.

The level of complexity that people on PS3+ and Xbox 360+ were/are dealing with and the high level libraries are decisively low level compared to all DX and OpenGL releases before DirectX 12 and Vulkan that is all I was really saying.

...and developers still tried to optimise as much as they could (especially first party developers... see Uncharted 3 and TLOU on PS3 versus a lot of especially early PS3 titles).

I was not taking about having to manually deal with assembly for VU’s, assembly for the VU’s VIF interfaces, direct DMA chains management without virtual to physical address mapping, but you wete still dealing with a lot of low level code on SPU’s, writing the GPU command buffers yourself and syncing it all... the massive job systems feeding those little monsters was not pleasant.
 

DryvBy

Member
They don't really have a real reason to jump to the "latest and greatest" API. Direct X isn't like a graphics engine in that it can totally change the look of a game. An API is like glue between the hardware and the software. DX12 can improve stutter or framerates in some occasions because of how it communicates selected hardware to Windows, but there's not a big reason to jump. One of the cool features in DX12 was the use of integrated hardware in combination of your GPU to smooth out stutter or improve framerates. I don't even know if a game even uses that.

I have a 1080 on my desktop and it doesn't run games any better (nor does it look any better) in DX12. It seems like there's a bigger advantage on AMD hardware right now, assuming it's related to async or whatever they're doing on Red Team. So when I'm playing a game, there's no benefit whatsoever to using it even if it's available. DX11 is fine.
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
pqgZ3yA.jpg


Remember the early days of XB1, when MrXMedia was trying to tell everybody that DX 12 would make the Xbox One more powerful than a PS4 and that it was going to "solve the resolution problems" Xbox One was having? Fun times.

It was part of the XB1 chalkboard at one point. Good times.
 
Short answer: Implementation.

Most devs don't delve into GL or APIs of their renderer, they just create games on what already works is implemented.

That's the overall problem with low-level APIs today: most people don't have time to waste with that so if it's not already implemented in-engine (it somewhat is) and also not compatible with enough devices, especially when the gains are not obvious, what's the point?


Oddly enough I think Vulkan has more future on mobile than PC, at least for now.
 

Nikana

Go Go Neo Rangers!
Remember the early days of XB1, when MrXMedia was trying to tell everybody that DX 12 would make the Xbox One more powerful than a PS4 and that it was going to "solve the resolution problems" Xbox One was having? Fun times.

"Keep digging"
 

LOLCats

Banned
I think we're looking at DX12 being a wash and DX13 will be the next major version adopted by developers and widely used as DX9 and DX11 were/are.
 
Last edited:

Armorian

Banned
I think we're looking at DX12 being a wash and DX13 will be the next major version adopted by developers and widely used as DX9 and DX11 were/are.

But what could next DX bring? With low level DX12\Vulcan and high level DX11.3 developers are set for whole 9 gen of consoles I think.
 
Top Bottom