Microsoft’s DirectX 12 was recently showcased at this year’s BUILD conference. A recent article on Neowin saw founder and CEO of Stardock Brad Wardell talk about how it was a game changer for the Xbox One, with the claim that it would help double the speed of the next gen console’s GPU.
Wardell himself took to Twitter to clarify his statement of DX12 giving “every Xbox One owner a new GPU that is twice as fast as the old one”. “It’s not literally (it’s software, not hardware) but yes, dx12 games will likely by more than 2x as fast.”
Other industry professionals were much more skeptical though. Rich Forster, programmer on SCE’s R&D PhyreEngine team, stated that, “Well that made me smile: http://www.neowin.net/news/directx-12-a-game-changer-for-xbox-one … DX12 will push GPUs twice as hard leading to overheating.”
PS4 ICE Team programmer Cort Stratton added that, “New SDKs can significantly improve performance on the same hardware, yes. Dunno about DX12/X1 specifically, of course; not my dept.
He also said that people have a right to be skeptical about performance gains. “Good; always be suspicious of ANY perf. improvement claims. e.g. what *exactly* got 50-100% faster? Faster than what? Details!”
Treyarch software engineer Dan Olson had a less amused take. “Here’s an article… no idea why people go on record for stuff like this. http://www.neowin.net/news/directx-12-a-game-changer-for-xbox-one”
Programmer Dean Ashton found it downright hilarious. Either that or life-threatening judging by his response. “2x perf on Xbox One when using DX12? That article nearly made me choke on my cup of tea.”
Software developer for .NET and Windows Phone Kévin Gosse said, “RyuJIT/SIMD, DX12, Mantle…Moving back to lower abstraction levels. Programming is about rediscovering the same principles again and again!”
It’s perhaps Billy O’Neal’s response that is most telling, seeing as he is a C# and C++ developer at Microsoft. “Both major consoles have a large number of weak sauce CPU cores. Hence the motivation to optimize that case.” Would any one from the company really go on record and say that?
Regardless, it’s obvious that there’s a large amount of skepticism about DirectX 12 and the performance gains it can offer for the Xbox One. DirectX 12 will be available in the 2015 holiday season. What are your thoughts on the API and its performance gain claims? Let us know in the comments.
