Reply to post: Re: am i the only one resisting this

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

Updraft102

Re: am i the only one resisting this

"If DX12 is the only real advantage of 10 over its predecessors than for any none gamer there is no real reason to upgrade. Gamers are about the only group that could possibly benefit from using it."

And even then, only the ones using AMD GPUs, which amount to about one in four Steam users (though 17% use Intel graphics, and I've never seen a DX12 test on those). For the majority who use Nvidia, DX12 at best is on par with DX11, and at worst DX12 causes a slight performance penalty. It's been true across all of the Nvidia architectures that support DX12 to date.

I know that some people will say that it will take some time for the game devs to optimize the code for DX12 fully, and that could be accurate (at least conceptually), but even with gamers being well ahead of the curve in Win 10 adoption, they're still under half of the market share as reported by Steam, so game design will still be tied to the least common denominator. Devs won't want to go so deep into DX12 that the more radical changes in the code make DX11 run poorly. They don't want to lose half their customers over poor performance that is a result of over-optimizing for DX12.

It also seems like a possibility that the "closer to the hardware" goal of DX12 will mean that getting to a level of optimization much beyond what we have with current DX12 games will require increasingly divergent code paths for AMD and Nvidia, or even by each architecture on both sides. Allowing more optimization to be done by the driver, as with DX11, allows greater abstraction of the hardware, which frees the game developer from having to worry about such nitty-gritty stuff and undesirable things like different code paths. There's no free lunch; you can't just slap DX12 on a game like putting a bumper sticker on a car and expect it to go faster. If the optimization is not being done by the driver, it has to be done by someone else, like the game developer. While a game can certainly be hand-tuned to be faster than one that is automatically optimized, that is labor intensive, and it has to be done for each GPU architecture the game is to be run on, and redone each time there is a significant game update.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon