Switching to DX12 mode, you’ll see greater gains on AMD cards generally speaking, much of which is down to AMD’s support for Async Compute across a broad range of cards. The benchmarker can be found in the Advanced Graphics Options in-game.Īs for what this means in terms of performance gains, well – it depends entirely on your GPU. Via Update 1 we’ve also added in benchmarking functionality for both DX11 and DX12 modes, so you can run your own before-and-after benchmarks and see whether your card performs better under DX11 or DX12. This means that, while some earlier-gen cards are technically DX12 compatible, you’ll see more DX11-to-DX12 performance gains across a greater range of AMD cards, as they get the benefit of Async Compute and therefore parallelize tasks better. In readiness for DX12, AMD have been building Async Compute functionality into their GPUs for quite some time now, including the new RX480. Async Compute enables the game-code to run tasks in parallel on the GPU, rather than in a single queue – the upside being better efficiency of task execution, and consequently higher framerates. However, there’s a feature of DX12 that requires a specific piece of GPU architecture to leverage, and that’s Asynchronous Compute.

That’s why DX12 is known as a ‘low-level’ API – it lets us get closer to directly controlling how the hardware and drivers work with our game, and gives us a lot of scope to make it work better.Ī number of cards are already DX12 compatible, as you can see from the table below. Rather than auto-managing a lot of the processes as DX11 and earlier did, DX12 exposes many of the functions of the graphics card so that developers like us can get hands-on with them, and program more efficient ways of using them.

So what is DX12? In short, it’s the latest DirectX graphics API from Microsoft – an interface which manages how the drivers, the game code and your PC hardware interact to generate the visual aspect of games, and it’s only available for Windows 10.ĭX12 differs quite significantly from previous DirectX versions. Alongside a ton of other optimisation work (see here for details), we’ve been working closely with AMD on implementing DX12, and the results are very promising.

Update 1 for Total War: WARHAMMER will be live on the 30/06 at 2pm BST, and once you’ve downloaded it, our beta version of DX12 will be available to try in-game.

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