I don't think you appreciate just what's going on.
1.6GHz-ish 8 core APU on a console vs. 3GHz-ish 4 core CPU on a PC is a whole different ballpark for starters.
There simply are no games out there that would push into the realm where DX12 truly shine and there are very good reasons for that! Developers have been dealing with the "batch batch batch" philosophy for literally decades. They are used to it and it's not like anyone is going to throw away the tool chain behind it just because they can (for no benefit in DX12 and huge cost in DX11). You can push seriously into this direction but then no sane developer will even make a DX11 version because it simply won't be usable. Say DX12 version runs at 60FPS and DX11 runs at 20FPS. That's entirely doable what would be the point in spending resources for a DX11 port of such a game though? To make a few forum enthusiasts happy? Developers already know that, there are tech demos for that. A good example of this direction is Ashes of Singularity. How playable is it in DX11? And you can check the development for way back when DX12 was not even on the drawing board? It's still not close to the limits of what DX12 allows.
When talking about this you also need to take note about what are we supposed to use all those draw calls for. 10000 player first person shooter? Yeah graphically I think we could handle that. Everything else will crumble. Space invaders with 500000 independently moving uniquely shaped, uniquely textured asteroids on screen at once? You could probably still do it with some effort on DX11.
If you're reading what developers are talking about around here I'd say it's pretty obvious that's not the direction that's going to be taken. There's a lot more talk about graphics pipelines where basically GPU feeds itself or advanced on GPU culling techniques for example. This approaches are again something that fits DX12 much much better and is again something that we probably are not going to see back ported to DX11 just so that we could make a comparison between the two APIs and be amazed by the awesome speedup.
I'd also like to point out that calling out immature drivers is a seriously slippery slope here... There's sort of a pinky promise here that drivers should be lite! They should not do a whole bunch of background analysis about what application is trying to do and then rearrange stuff to better fit hardware like they do in DX11. Which then causes head aches for game developers when pipeline stalls out of the blue. It's not guaranteed to stay this way.
Basically if DX11 runs better then DX12 then driver does a better job then game developers. Which after 7 years since DX11 was publicly released I'm freaking amazed anyone finds surprising. If it's the other way around then game developers are doing a better job then the drivers. There are no magic "DX12 instructions". There is async compute that can help if hardware can make use of it but it's in no way magic.
Gonna use some bullet points.
1. The drivers are barely a year old(younger in the case of Vulcan). Of course they're immature. Any driver would be immature after just a year. Recall the issues that GCN had in its beginning. After about a year and a half, it improved better than the average driver maturity cycle does for new generations because it was a completely new architecture and needed time. They had something to build off of(Adhering to DX11/Open GL), unlike DX12/Vulcan(Well, AMD has Mantle to build off of. Nvidia and Intel are SOL there. they have their own little APIs that we all know about, of course, but that's far different from DX12/Vulcan) where you have do things incredibly different, thus it's easier to make mistakes on the first go around when writing in support for your hardware and etc. No one's perfect, otherwise we wouldn't have software bugs.
It's not that drivers are magic bullets, it's that software development takes time and often the first release isn't optimal. I know DX12 is lighter, and thus there's only so much the driver can do. That's not what I was referring to. I'm referring to the fact that it's so new.
I also expect that if somehow more DX12/Vulcan games were out, the drivers would be more advanced. That said, there's only so much one can do in a limited time.
2. Tool chains, etc. That's what I meant by engines, though given I was using engines as shorthand for everything that goes into the programming side of development I see where you got mixed up. My bad. I use shorthand a lot because typing is hard due to disabilities. you'll likely find a lot of other confusing terminology if you look through my posts. I literally knew all of what you were saying; I read this place a lot. I combined it all because typing as much as I am causes pain.
Anyway, I know that current games are in no way gonna make it work properly. I honestly don't think we're gonna see a mainstream game with... not sure what phrasing I should use here... I guess built with DX12/Vulcan in mind until 2018 or 2019, possibly later. After all, it took ages for proper DX11 games into being. Most games supporting it until about three and a half years ago(maybe just 3) were engines that had it... Again, not sure what phrasing to use here, given this is a technical subject... bolted on, maybe?
We'll go with bolted on for the moment, but I'm sure there's a better phrase.
Anyway, most games until about 3/3 and a half years ago just had it bolted on, for lack of a better term. Then 2013 hit and everything began to change very quickly, especially if the game had no X360/PS3/Wii U ports and was just PC or just(then) next gen/PC.
Mainstream games tend to take longer to adopt APIs in terms of building a game to suit the API rather than integrating the API into an already existing codebase... So, I expect we'll likely see more independent or semi-independent games pop up built with DX12/Vulcan in mind in the next five years than we will mainstream games. They likely won't go to the heights(So to speak) that the mainstream games do(Budgets are always an issue!), but we already have one game built closer to what DX12/Vulcan can enable than the mainstream games: AOTS. It's got DX11 support, sure, but it acts a lot more like a DX12 game from what I've read.
I'll likely amend this later; said disabilities are kicking in a little too much.
