Joel Bylos, Creative Director at Funcom [the team behind The Park] has shared his thoughts on DirectX12 and how it can possibly improve games performance on Xbox One. Speaking to GamingBolt, Bylos stated that there is a difference in the way DX12 works for Xbox One compared to gaming PCs.
“So, DirectX12 on PC and DirectX12 on Xbox One are slightly different propositions,” Bylos stated. “The bottleneck on Xbox One is the GPU and DirectX12 is not a magical panacea which will suddenly remove that bottleneck,” he added.
It must be noted than when Microsoft started to plan the architecture of the Xbox One, they had already included a low level API that takes advantage of DX11 libraries. This is something that Bylos reiterates. “Remember that the Xbox One was already optimized to take advantage of DirectX11 at a hardware level,” he stated.
However if developers plan to use DX12 on Xbox One games, there will be certain advantages such as optimized draw calls. This may not make things faster or prettier, but will push out more things on the screen, according to Bylos.
“So the primary advantage of DX12 on Xbox One, in my opinion, will be the optimized draw call pipeline. Which means more things happening on screen – but not necessarily faster or prettier things.”
Bylos further notes that the DX12 will actually help the Xbox One widen its gap from the PS4 in terms of CPU processing power. It’s already known for a while that the Xbox One has a better CPU than the PS4, something that Sony have been trying to optimize via their own SDK updates.
“If anything it widens the gap between the CPU on the Xbox One and the PS4, giving the Xbox One a larger advantage in the area where it already had one.”
It will be interesting to see what kind of benefits will DX12 have on Xbox One. Hopefully Microsoft will release some benchmarks in the future that will exactly show the users about the benefits of a faster API on a console.