Microsoft uses 3DMark to show DirectX 12 benefits

Posted March 21, 2014 by RyanR in News

Microsoft shared the first public details of DirectX 12 at GDC yesterday. And I’m delighted that they chose 3DMark 11 to demonstrate the advantages of the new API. In their words,

“3DMark [11] on Direct3D 11 uses multi-threading extensively, however due to a combination of runtime and driver overhead, there is still significant idle time on each core. After porting the benchmark to use Direct3D 12, we see two major improvements – a 50% improvement in CPU utilization, and better distribution of work among threads.”

3DMark performance comparison: DirectX 11 vs DirectX 12

The chart shows the time 3DMark 11 spends in each thread in DirectX 11 (top) and DirectX 12 (bottom). This MSDN blog post explains how the efficiencies in DirectX 12 are achieved:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2014/03/20/directx-12.aspx

A new 3DMark test for DirectX 12

With DirectX 12 game developers will be able to create richer scenes with more objects by better utilizing modern GPU hardware. DirectX 12 also introduces a set of new rendering features that will dramatically improve the efficiency of algorithms such as order-independent transparency, collision detection, and geometry culling.

I’m excited to announce that we are creating a new 3DMark benchmark that will demonstrate and test the full capabilities of DirectX 12.