Firaxis Games has released a new patch that adds DX12 support for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, therefore it’s time now to compare these two modes and see whether there are any performance improvements.
Thankfully, Firaxis Games has included two in-game benchmark tools. The first benchmark stresses the GPU, while the second one measures AI and turn-processing performance.
As we can see, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI performed similarly in DX11 and DX12 on our PC system (Intel i7 4930K (turbo boosted at 4.2Ghz) with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti and GTX690, Windows 10 64-bit and the latest WHQL version of the GeForce drivers).
What’s really interesting here, however, is the GPU usage. As we can see, in DX12 our GPU was used to its fullest. Still, the DX11 path was as fast as the DX12 one, even though our GPU was underused in DX11.
This may show the incredible job that NVIDIA has done with its drivers regarding the DX11 API. It also shows that DX12 is not a magical trick that will automatically increase your performance, especially when NVIDIA has done an incredible work with its driver optimizations.
According to reports, AMD owners can expect better performance under DX12, however this may be also due to the fact that AMD’s drivers are not as optimized for DX11 games as NVIDIA’s are.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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