AMD Radeon R9 390X doubles the performance of DirectX 12

Much more efficient use of system resources is the big argument for the new DirectX 12 in Windows 10. The current RTS game Ashes of the Singularity is the very first real game title with support for both DX11 and DX12, which means that the claim can be put to the test by examining the actual performance in reality-based scenarios.

The American technology site PC Perspective offers a wealth of performance tests and discovers a couple of interesting patterns. That multi-core processors have the most to gain from the transition to the DX12 may not be a big deal, but oddly enough, it also appears that AMD’s graphics cards bring home significantly greater performance gains than Nvidia’s ditto.

Depending on the configuration and resolution, a Radeon R9 390X can more than double the frame rate just by switching to the DX12. The Geforce GTX 980 also gets a boost in most cases, but not at all in the same order of magnitude but rather around a relatively modest 10–20 percent.

However, the question is open whether it is possible to draw any more far-reaching conclusions from the performance in particular Ashes of the Singularity. The authors suspect that AMD’s huge increase in performance can be traced to the fact that the Radeon partner’s implementation of DX11 is significantly worse than what the competitor Nvidia offers and that the effect of this is more or less eliminated during the transition to DX12.

At the same time, Nvidia protests and points out that the game is an early alpha version with several shortcomings.