Microsoft, DirectX 12 and the Xbox One - Will It Make a Difference?

Since announcing DirectX 12, Microsoft has been pretty coy about how the changes might affect its console. In fact, take a poke among the underbox of most gaming sites and you'll see someone, somewhere, claiming that the new API could bring a little more parity with the PS4 in terms of 1080p graphics.

Xbox top dog, Phil Spencer was previously quoted as saying:

“On the DX12 question, I was asked early on by people if DX12 is gonna dramatically change the graphics capabilities of Xbox One and I said it wouldn’t. I’m not trying to rain on anybody’s parade, but the CPU, GPU and memory that are on Xbox One don’t change when you go to DX12. DX12 makes it easier to do some of the things that Xbox One’s good at, which will be nice and you’ll see improvement in games that use DX12, but people ask me if it’s gonna be dramatic and I think I answered no at the time and I’ll say the same thing.”

Now Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has weighed in, while doing the rounds promoting his latest game, Ashes of Singularity:

“With the Xbox One we’re being pretty speculative right because there isn’t a game that’s using DirectX 12 on the console at this point in time, so I can’t even do a side by side comparison. Whereas on the PC we have Ashes of the Singularity. It is a game that’s been optimized for DirectX 11 and updated for DirectX 12, and you can run them side by side on the same hardware and get a 70% boost on DirectX 12 over DirectX 11.

So it’s pretty easy for me to say yes you’ll get a huge impact on PC, but on the console it’s all a theory. They have nothing, they don’t even know. I mean I’ve talked to the development team there on this subject for a while and it basically boils down to, we don’t know how much of an effect it will have because so much of it is in the hands of the developer.

I mean that’s the thing I like about being able to make a prediction, is that something that’s on a visual medium like this is that we’ll be able to revisit this discussion a year from now and it will be pretty obvious. You’ll see the games that run on DirectX 12 and you’ll be able to compare them with games that run on DirectX11 on the Xbox One and you’ll be like ‘Oh, yeah there’s quite a difference’." wrote:

So, in the wrong hands, we could see next to no difference. But with the right developer, it's likely that we'll see a substantial difference.

Interesting little read that. I admit I am no computer or software expert. By the sound of thing's, it might take the game developers a while to get use to DirectX12. It will be interesting to see what happens.

A good read.

Roll on July