DirectX 12 tested: An early win for AMD and disappointment for Nvidia

Of all the features that Windows 10 brings to the table—the return of the Start menu, Cortana, the Xbox App—the most interesting for gamers, DirectX 12, has remained the most mysterious. Sure, the promise of a graphics API that allows console-like low-level access to the GPU and CPU, as well as improved performance for existing graphics cards, is tremendously exciting—but there's been no way to actually test those features and see just what kind of performance uplift (if any) there is. Until now.

Enter Oxide Games' real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity, the very first publicly available game that natively uses DirectX 12. Even better, it has a DX11 mode, too, which means for the first time we can make a direct comparison between the real-world (i.e. actual game) performance of the two APIs across different hardware. Earlier benchmarks like 3DMark's API Overhead feature test were interesting, but entirely synthetic, and focused on the maximum number of draw calls per second (which allows a game engine to draw more objects, textures, and effects) achieved by each API.

What's so special about DirectX 12?

DirectX 12 features an entirely new programming model, one that works on a wide range of existing hardware. On the AMD side, that means any GPU featuring GCN 1.0 or higher (cards like the R9 270, R9 290X, and Fury X) are supported, while Nvidia says anything from Fermi (400-series and up) will work. Not every one of those graphics cards will support every feature of DirectX 12, though, thanks to how the API is split into different feature levels. Those levels include extra features like Conservative Rasterization, Tiled Resources, Raster Order Views, and Typed UAV Formats.