Microsoft has had great success with Xbox Live, and it’s now time to extend that to phones, tablets, and desktop PCs. From phone to tablet to console to PC, Phil Spencer has promised that the gaming experience will be great for everyone on any Windows 10 device.
With DirectX 12, the company is offering game developers access “closer to the metal” than ever before, allowing them to tap into the full potential of today’s powerful multi-core processors. Games will be able to run up to 50% faster even on the current DirectX 11 hardware. That will be especially important for open world games, which tend to be very CPU-bound.
Spencer showed off the benefits of the new game programming API by displaying an upcoming Futuremark demo running on two machines with the same hardware configuration. One of the computers ran the demo using DirectX 11, and as the level of graphical complexity and detail was increased, it slowed down to a standstill.
The machine with DirectX 12 handled the stress very well, managing to maintain decent framerate even with many more graphical elements to display in the cityscape scene. Here’s a video to show you the difference:
