DX 11 and DX 12

[IAEInferno]

Hi, what are the factors that would make Dx 11 better over Dx 12 and vice versa when gaming?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Well, for DX11 right now it would be the level of support that makes it better, as well as compatibility. In terms of features and theoretical performance, DX12 is better in pretty much every way, it's just not really being used right now. 

 

EDIT: One of the biggest benefits for DX12 is the level of access it gives developers. It allows for lower level access to hardware and resources, allowing for developers to better optimise their games. That said, those sorts of benefits require the developer to actually implement them. Just switching over to DX12 isn't enough, it actually takes a lot of changing in the game's code to make a difference. We're still very much is the stages of developers learning how to use DX12. It will be a while before it becomes mainstream for game developers. 

 

EDIT2: LTT just put out a video covering some stuff on DX12 and Vulcan, it may help you. 

 

 

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, IAEInferno said:

Hi, what are the factors that would make Dx 11 better over Dx 12 and vice versa when gaming?

Direct X 12 promises superior performance through numerous low level optimizations that developers can make. Unfortunately it requires lots of work on a developer's part.

 

 

Direct X 11 has great stability, documentation however, it is not well optimized and is not as low level as DX12.

[Gonio]

DX11 is current and now... Dx12/Vulkan is future as it is superior in theory. As you can hear in the video, that time is not totally here yet. Because for the real bang for the buck you have to wait a while still (expect that over 2-3 years these improvements are far more mainstraim). AMD currently has the bigger gain in performance vs Nvidia, but that is most likely to catch up once Nvidia feels the real need to adjust, simply because it's not mainstream yet. Atleast I think they have bet on that and figured that their better efficiency will make up for now until they bring out new gen cards that do.

 

So for questions like what GPU to buy or recommend, it is still the same. It depends most on what you play. But as with multi GPU (SLI/CF) don't focus to much on what you could gain in the future. Just take something that works now for you. Atleast thats what I role with for now: don't lean to much on upcoming features that depends way to much on how well it is actually implemented.

[Shubham Yadav]

It's like assembly code vs higher level language. Assembly will be more efficient, you can do more things with it and it directly accesses the hardware( with the machine code below it). But it's harder to code and optimize properly.

 

Here, DX12 is like assembly code. Really hard to implement properly and the only game that uses decent DX12 implementation is AoTS. Meanwhile DX11 is like a normal language, which everyone is familiar with, guides are available, game engines use it and in general is less painful to make games on. You are also guaranteed a certain degree of optimization, which DX12 simply doesn't give.

 

All in all the conclusion is:

DX11:

• Easier
• Guides available online to develop and debug.
• Guarantees a decent degree of optimization due to already some pretty good game engines using it.

DX12

• Hard to do, but promises better result if you work hard enough.
• More drawcalls possible.
• Can use more cores, async compute, and in general more hardware resources because of direct access.