DirectX 12: The future of it within the console gaming space (specifically the XB1)

[Cyan]

Interesting day ahead of us. I hope I'm around to catch it, busy day at work.
Brad Wardell is bringing the hype already, it's not even 9am PST.
I really hope his game is awesome looking.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=154238780&postcount=760

I'd expect a tech demo more than a full-fledged game, but it is going to be interesting nonetheless. Hype!!

Plus.., Phil Spencer is going to talk about DirectX12 and the future of gaming, in addition to the improvements on Xbox One games, owing mosty to DirectX 12.

http://microsoft-news.com/gdc-starts-tomorrow-phil-spencer-will-talk-about-the-future-of-gaming-across-the-microsoft-ecosystem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+msftnws+(Microsoft+News)

 

[Metal_Spirit]

We now have a number on the GPU percentage gains on Xbox One (or PS4 for that matter since most gains are from the API capabilities that GNM should also support, and not anything Xbox specific) due to DX 12!

Up to 20%

Off course this is a theoretical maximum, not a permanent fixed gain. Some games will gain less. Regardless its a good number since low level APIs were already present on both consoles. I somewhat expected less.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

(or PS4 for that matter since most gains are from the API capabilities that GNM should also support, and not anything Xbox specific)

 

[Jwm]

Conflicting reports now about the 20%, was it X1, was it PC, or was it just Fable Legends on PC?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Conflicting reports now about the 20%, was it X1, was it PC, or was it just Fable Legends on PC?

All I know is he wasn't referring to xbox one in general.

 

[Jwm]

• DirectX 12: DirectX 12 enables PC developers to have a new level of power and control and is a single API developers can access across Windows devices. As shown with Fable Legends running on Unreal Engine 4, there has been a 20% improvement in performance. And as announced today, Epic is creating Unreal Tournament using Unreal Engine 4 running on DirectX 12, which sets a new bar for visual fidelity in PC gaming.

Link

Edit: and not yet fully related (hopefully soon) my UE4 project won't need a 20% improvement as my art style is way simpler than needed. Ha!

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Conflicting reports now about the 20%, was it X1, was it PC, or was it just Fable Legends on PC?

Humm.. At the time I had just read the DualShockers news. But you are correct! Apparently that gain is in the PC version of Fable Legends! Nothing points to XONE.

 

[Jwm]

Humm.. At the time I had just read the DualShockers news. But you are correct! Apparently that gain is in the PC version of Fable Legends! Nothing points to XONE.

Only twitter. LOL What a confusing mess, have to wait for the video later on to hear it straight from the source.

 

[function]

There will be a benefit for Xbox One, but games are already carefully optimised for it and it has that "reduced overhead" mono driver, so I'm guessing the PC stands to gain from it more.

 

[Shortbread]

I think Phil said it best...

“On the DX12 question, I was asked early on by people if DX12 is gonna dramatically change the graphics capabilities of Xbox One and I said it wouldn’t. I’m not trying to rain on anybody’s parade, but the CPU, GPU and memory that are on Xbox One don’t change when you go to DX12. DX12 makes it easier to do some of the things that Xbox One’s good at, which will be nice and you’ll see improvement in games that use DX12, but people ask me if it’s gonna be dramatic and I think I answered no at the time and I’ll say the same thing.”

Hopefully people will start to realize (again) that PS4 and XB1 hardware are set in stone. And that any software/API updates are going to improve certain things - not create miracles.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Only twitter. LOL What a confusing mess, have to wait for the video later on to hear it straight from the source.

Can you link to that tweet?

But maybe it´s not confusing at all! Xbox One is also 100% DX 11 compatible. And in pure DX 11 there are no low level optimizations. So from that pesrpective, Xbox One can also improve about 20%!

 

[iroboto]

Can you link to that tweet?

But maybe it´s not confusing at all! Xbox One is also 100% DX 11 compatible. And in pure DX 11 there are no low level optimizations. So from that pesrpective, Xbox One can also improve about 20%!

Well then we shouldn't expect much change then. If you're referring of moving from DX11.1 to DX11.3 (the higher level version of DX12). Though I expect parallel rendering to be still effective on 11.3 even if there is more overhead present.

The move from DX11.1/11.3 -> DX12 should net a 20% increase in performance. But DX11(fast semantics) to DX12 would not.

 

[iroboto]

the Xbox GDC presentation recorded
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GDC/GDC-2015/The-Future-of-Gaming-Across-the-Microsoft-Ecosystem

 

[Starx]

https://twitter.com/draginol/status/573267858840420352

 

[iroboto]

Interesting that he's come out and said that. ESRAM API? Any thoughts on why eSRAM would need an API?

 

[3dilettante]

The thing is that that set is not exclusive to the customizations added to DX 11.X. Earlier presentations showed that bundles of some sort were present, and the successive SDKs introduced lower-overhead calls. These are measures with lower overhead than bog-standard, although DX12 should be lower.
The parallelism facet is something that proved to be a shortcoming in DX 11.X that most did not expect.

There were also changes to ESRAM management more recently, but that doesn't preclude DX12 from bringing a changed API on top of that.

 

[iroboto]

Here's another tweet from Brad showing new performance tools for XO. https://mobile.twitter.com/draginol/status/573258992274710528/photo/1

My phone is too crappy to see any details. I'm unsure as to what Brad is alluding to here.

 

[Ike Turner]

He clearly doesn't have much of a clue... PIX is a debugging / monitoring tool which is part of the xdk since the 360. As seen in the XDK leak it now supports real time bandwidth counters to monitor esram traffic and usage. There's no DX12 ESRAM API :_\

 

[liquidboy]

There's no DX12 ESRAM API :_\

Oh ... you have seen the dx12/dx11.3 api surface?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Xbox One launched either without PIX or an extremely limited version of it. I can't remember. Even very recently they were still adding features to it. It could be the case that PIX is currently still not up to par, and the DX12 version will be more "complete."

There are API calls for managing ESRAM. It doesn't have its own API, but there are ESRAM related API calls, from what I remember in the docs. It could be that they've added more.

The way he's mentioned those things do seem to imply he doesn't really know what's new and what's not.