Legit Reviews

Gamers are more than excited about DirectX 12 coming to market later this year and after seeing what other low-level APIs like AMD Mantle could do with regards to lowering the API overhead we certainly understand why. Futuremark recently released a DirectX 12 feature test called the 3DMark API Overhead Feature Test that allows enthusiasts and gamers to look at the draw call benefits of the new DX12 API. The 3DMark API Overhead Feature Test should show how future game titles that were developed 'to the metal' perform.




Article Title: Looking At DirectX 12 Performance – 3DMark API Overhead Feature Test
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/looking-at- ... est_160936

So all this only applies to DirectX12 graphics cards, right? Direcx11 cards will not be affected?

sbohdan wrote:So all this only applies to DirectX12 graphics cards, right? Direcx11 cards will not be affected?

Yeah, if a card won't support DX12 it won't be able to get any of the low-level API benefits much like AMD Mantle only worked on some cards.

I would love to see some numbers on older cards since I have read that cards from the 400 series (nvidia) to the present will be able to take advantage of DX12. I am guessing there wont be a huge increase in performance because the cards were not built to optimize for DX12 but if there is enough of a performance leap, people with older cards may benefit greatly.

heck maybe I will try with my 660GTX and i7-3770k...... then again maybe not...running windows 10 in a VM wouldnt be good and I wont install it full on as I have not seen much that I like about Windows 10 over Windows 7 yet.

Still, would be nice to see how lower end cards fair with DX12

KnightRid wrote:I would love to see some numbers on older cards since I have read that cards from the 400 series (nvidia) to the present will be able to take advantage of DX12. I am guessing there wont be a huge increase in performance because the cards were not built to optimize for DX12 but if there is enough of a performance leap, people with older cards may benefit greatly.

heck maybe I will try with my 660GTX and i7-3770k...... then again maybe not...running windows 10 in a VM wouldnt be good and I wont install it full on as I have not seen much that I like about Windows 10 over Windows 7 yet.

Still, would be nice to see how lower end cards fair with DX12

Let us know if there is any benefit for older cards! Please.

KnightRid wrote:I would love to see some numbers on older cards since I have read that cards from the 400 series (nvidia) to the present will be able to take advantage of DX12. I am guessing there wont be a huge increase in performance because the cards were not built to optimize for DX12 but if there is enough of a performance leap, people with older cards may benefit greatly.

heck maybe I will try with my 660GTX and i7-3770k...... then again maybe not...running windows 10 in a VM wouldnt be good and I wont install it full on as I have not seen much that I like about Windows 10 over Windows 7 yet.

Still, would be nice to see how lower end cards fair with DX12

Sorry for the delayed response... Had some major family emergencies this week and was just able to get around to testing this for you today. Here are a few quick runs on a GeForce GTX 680 (couldn't find my 660 quickly in storage, so I figured this would suffice). I ran it on 4-core and 8-core with HT enabled so you can get an idea of quad-core performance on your system. The results don't exactly make sense, but these are the average of three runs at each test (so 9 total benchmark runs of the API test).
Why performance went up with the decrease in cores with DX12 is beyond me. The DX11 ST test shows the same increase, but the DX11 MT test shows a decrease... Odd stuff. I blame the early drivers!

The take home message here is that there is about a 9x performance improvement between DX11 ST to DX12, so the API overhead has been greatly reduced. There was a ~12x increase on the GTX 780, so it isn't as much as a new GPU, but still significant and pretty damn close. Hope this is sort of what you were looking for!

Awesome Nate, thank you! Hope everything is ok with the family!!!!

That is goofy how the performance went up decreasing the cores but I am with you on the early drivers theory. I imagine as they get closer to release they will optimize further for multiple cores.

It is also surprising how close the numbers are to the newer cards. i thought the older cards would be around 3-4 million draws (yea i was guessing in my head) but they are only about that much lower than the newer ones. Really does seem to take the power needed away from the video card. i bet Nvidia and AMD will be soooooo happy that people will be able to hang on to video cards even longer ;)