DX 12 looks like the real deal, and what we've all been patiently waiting for.

[spat55]

Witcher 3, Arkham Knight and Battlefront will likely be among the first games to get DX12 (and perhaps BF Hardline too but there's not enough people playing that game now), but I'd wait for real time benchmarks rather than a bunch of simulated tests and splecuations.

If they lowered the price for Hardline with premium to £20 I'd bite but for a reskined BF 4 they are asking way to much.

 

[Sabrewings]

I've also had only a great experience with games under Windows 10. Only one of my three machines had a problem free upgrade, but now that it's done I'm happy.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I upgraded last night easy process. I tested out two games and no problems.
I'll be honest I was swiping to turn my PC off.

 

[Regs]

Do I have to reinstall my 3rd party programs ?

 

[i7Baby]

If you let Microsoft do it - as an upgrade - then NO. Only if you then want to do a 'clean install' will you have to re-install Apps too.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Check this out: http://www.legitreviews.com/looking...mance-3dmark-api-overhead-feature-test_160936

Now most of y'all understand that, that doesn't mean a 6x improvement in performance... like we saw with mantle, performance was only increased on systems with AMD CPU's. Basically you could get $300 intel level performance on a $100 AMD CPU *if* the game supported mantle. So, what does this mean for gaming?

Well in the short run, where DX 12 will be *supported* on games (and I expect DX 12 patches will start hitting existing games for the multi-gpu native support and overhead decrease... but no extra graphical features obviously), we will see more longevity for CPU life, but in the long run- say any game released mid 2016 and forward... they are about to look a lot freakin better. Not necessarily texture quality, but particles, physx, anything that makes a crap ton of draw calls to the GPU. Those things don't take extreme GPU power to render... it doesn't work right now because of the overhead and the fact the CPU- no matter how fast- just can't keep up. Think about 6x the amount of available draw calls. I'm not computer expert, but that sounds a lot to me like 6x the stuff in games without major performance sacrifices. Time will tell, but I don't think I've ever been so anxious about something before. Multi-GPU support, so much more overhead, the idea of extremely complex games compared to now... Ahhhh I can't wait.

Actually you are not correct. Mantle increased performance on both AMD and Intel cpus. In general, it improved it more on AMD, but cpus from both camps showed increases in cpu limited situations.

For instance in this test BF4 DX11 vs mantle Mantle actually caused a bigger increase for the 4670k than it did for the FX8350. There was also a nice improvement in the Haswell i3 under mantle.

 

[Elcs]

I'm more interested in the benefits that Mantle provides, even with my rather old i5 2500k and HD7950. Haven't heard much about it lately though which concerns me.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

DX12 looks promising but history has taught us that adoption is slow by developers and early adoptions is primative and doesn't make use of many of the available features. It will be a year before we have really decent use of DX12 and we probably wont see DX12 games built from the ground up for something like 3 years.

 

[TheELF]

DX12 looks promising but history has taught us that adoption is slow by developers and early adoptions is primative and doesn't make use of many of the available features. It will be a year before we have really decent use of DX12 and we probably wont see DX12 games built from the ground up for something like 3 years.

The idea here is to give the PC the same API that the consoles have,up until now console games got much better performance (in relation to it's hardware) because the consoles have low level APIs that the PC lacked,until now games got written on consoles and the devs had to find a (cheap and fast) way to translate the low level stuff to something the PC could render,now they won't have to change anything, DX12 will pretty much be a ps4/xbone emulator, you will be able to run the same code with the same efficiency.
(well that's the theory anyways)

 

[futurefields]

I'm more interested in the benefits that Mantle provides, even with my rather old i5 2500k and HD7950. Haven't heard much about it lately though which concerns me.

Dude Mantle is done. It is only on the BF4 and BF: Hardline and maybe a couple other Frostbite games. They are not continuing it because there is no point now.

 

[Elcs]

Dude Mantle is done. It is only on the BF4 and BF: Hardline and maybe a couple other Frostbite games. They are not continuing it because there is no point now.

That's sad considering what DirectX 12 will bring... like DirectX 10, it's little revisions and 11 has given us in the past many years.

 

[futurefields]

DirectX 12 is bringing everything Mantle brought and then some. And it will be the main API, not a third party that you need to bribe devs to support.

 

[Elcs]

DirectX 12 is bringing everything Mantle brought and then some. And it will be the main API, not a third party that you need to bribe devs to support.

Will it bring as much to the end user as DirectX 10 and 11 did?

It might have a lot of impressive features and promise a lot but unless devs pick it up and we see it as an end user... it is as worthless as some of it's predecessors.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Will it bring as much to the end user as DirectX 10 and 11 did?

It might have a lot of impressive features and promise a lot but unless devs pick it up and we see it as an end user... it is as worthless as some of it's predecessors.

Difference is, DX12 is what developers have wanted for a long time. Their engines will perform better on a wider variety of hardware. Not just the elite high end anymore.

 

[mizzou]

On a second thought, If game devs can hardly ever utilize 64bit architecture, what makes us think they will take advantage of dx12?

I realized playing cities skylines that my nearly ancient processor holds it's own extremely well.

Either way, I'm excited to see what people can do with this new tech, I just hope they utilize it!

 

[Wookiestick]

It will likely take years for adoption but on paper it sounds like a great thing.

 

[Sabrewings]

On a second thought, If game devs can hardly ever utilize 64bit architecture, what makes us think they will take advantage of dx12?

How exactly have they not utilized x64? The only benefit to it is larger amounts of memory access and a lot of games can regularly run your RAM over 4GB, so it is being used.

 

[bystander36]

How exactly have they not utilized x64? The only benefit to it is larger amounts of memory access and a lot of games can regularly run your RAM over 4GB, so it is being used.

Not to mention that for years, games had no need for x64. They didn't need more than 4Gb of addressable space, nor any 64 bit instructions. There was nothing to gain by using it. DX12, on the other hand, serves a real need today. Not to mention it is much more similar to consoles than DX11, which almost all AAA games today are written for.

 

[Red Hawk]

I'm more interested in the benefits that Mantle provides, even with my rather old i5 2500k and HD7950. Haven't heard much about it lately though which concerns me.

Like futurefields said, DirectX 12 should have all the advantages of Mantle and then some. That's why AMD has abandoned further development of Mantle in favor of supporting DirectX 12, and gave the code for Mantle to Khronos for Vulkan. Mantle was important in how it started this move towards low-level graphics APIs, but the problem was always going to be low adoption because it only works on one vendor's graphics cards. DirectX 12 is the better solution moving forward.

DX12 looks promising but history has taught us that adoption is slow by developers and early adoptions is primative and doesn't make use of many of the available features. It will be a year before we have really decent use of DX12 and we probably wont see DX12 games built from the ground up for something like 3 years.

Adoption of DirectX 10 and 11 was slow initially because they used graphics features unavailable to consoles at the time, so most developers didn't bother. One of the points of DirectX 12 is not just new graphical features, but enabling programming and optimization techniques that were already available on current gen consoles, as explained here. DirectX 12 makes programming for PC games more similar to programming for consoles, not less similar. So I think that will speed up adoption of DirectX 12 as compared to DirectX 10 and 11.

 

[Scooby Doo]

Not to mention that for years, games had no need for x64. They didn't need more than 4Gb of addressable space, nor any 64 bit instructions. There was nothing to gain by using it. DX12, on the other hand, serves a real need today. Not to mention it is much more similar to consoles than DX11, which almost all AAA games today are written for.

Textures, textures, textures is the reason we need 64bit.

 

[bystander36]

Textures, textures, textures is the reason we need 64bit.

That may be why they are using it now, but it took many years before they needed it.