Microsoft: DirectX 12 will increase your graphics performance by 20 percent
What does this mean 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.
On Thursday, Max McMullen, a principal development lead for Microsoft, outlined the technical resources that DirectX 12 would be making available to software developers. But he also noted that Microsoft has carefully recorded, anonymously, the hardware that PC gamers are using to connect to Microsoft's resources and download and run the technical previews of Window 10. McMullen said that Microsoft believes that Windows 10 will run on about 50 percent of all PCs today, and that it will "have two-thirds hardware coverage" by this Christmas.
"So it's going to be a great, huge platform for lots of endpoints to reach," McMullen said.
To be fair, the contrast between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 has been shown off before: specifically at SIGGRAPH 2014, when Intel emphasized the potential power savings that DirectX 12 could bring. Then, Intel said that frame rates could increase by 50 percent from one API to the other.
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.
McMullen didn't disclose what hardware the benchmark was running on, and didn't indicate whether Nvidia cards, for example, would see a greater improvement than hardware for AMD. The overall message was a simple one, however: if you're a gamer, you'll want to upgrade to Windows 10 and DirectX 12.