DirectX 12 is here! Sort of! While the latest version of the ubiquitous API is baked into Windows 10, full support is really only going to start coming this year, and we’ve been left wondering just how good the performance improvements are going to be.
If Stuart Whyte, studio director over at Lionhead, is to be believed, then those improvements are going to be very significant. Speaking with business site Bidness Etc, Whyte said that his team was seeing “up to 40% faster performance” versus DX11. That’s a lot! While Whyte, as a Microsoft employee, has an interest in making DX12 seem like the next big thing, that’s such an optimistic number that it’s easy to get excited about.
Naturally, those boosts are going to depend on your graphics card. But with DX12 support going back through years of graphics cards, if you’re PC gaming in 2016 you’re bound to see performance boosts when support starts rolling out. The DX12 rollout will be anchored by Microsoft-published games like Fable Legends and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition later this year. And we’ll obviously have to see real-world benchmarks before we know all this hullabaloo is worth it.
Of course, the quality of Fable Legends itself is still up in the air. It’s a free-to-play co-op action title as opposed to the series’ previous RPG entries, and it’s tough to imagine the series without it being backed by Peter Molyneux’s laughable yet laudable grandiose promises of emotional and gameplay depth.
But hey, it’s going to be free and the dungeon master RTS component seems pretty neat. Hopefully the graphical bells and whistles won’t be the only thing going for it.
