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DX12 Is Able to Handle 600K Draw Calls, 600% Performance Increase Achieved on AMD GPUs

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The Inner Circle – a collection of Xbox One gamers who hunt down the latest and greatest, news, interviews & rumors on the xbox one platform – featured in their latest podcast Brad Wardell who shared some really interesting information about DirectX 12 and its capabilities.

According to Wardell, DX12 is able to handle 600K draw calls. In contrast, DX9 is able to push only 6K draw calls so that’s a huge increase. However, Wardell did not reveal the ‘draw calls’ limit of DX11, therefore we cannot compare the latest released API with the new upcoming one.

Moreover, Wardell claimed that DX12 can offer up to 600% better performance on AMD cards than DX11. This claim is based on Anandtech’s recent benchmarks, in which Oxide’s Star Swarm Tech Demo ran with 7fps via DX11 on a Raden R9 290X and with 43fps via DX12. For comparison purposes, the tech demo ran with 41fps via Mantle, proving that DX12 may actually be faster than AMD’s own low-level API.

Wardell talked about lots of things during this podcast, so we strongly suggest listening to it.

Here is a summary provided by NeoGAF‘s member ‘Livelife’

-Anandtech AMD cards 7fps to 43fps running Nitrous engine DX12 engine.
-600% performance increase on AMD cards running full DX12 game engine.
-CPU cores n their performance more important in the future games .
-Directx 12 on Xbox Nov.
-Directx 12 runs better than Mantle on AMD cards.
-Dx9 uses max 6000 draw calls vs 600,000 on dx12.
-Naysayers are eating crow!
-“Marketing chose 40% increase slogan as real gains were too unbelievable for the masses to digest”
-limitless light sources in games.
-1000+ characters AI characters on screen.
-toy story/ lord of the rings graphics no deffered rendering.
-future Xbox cpu bound exclusives DX12 games to have these gains however dx12 games initially 30% gains as they transition from Dx11 to full new dx12 game engines using esram etc
-Not so much games for cross platform games.
-Fable Legends Dx12 game
-AMD/MS has mega DX12 news at GDC.
-Stardock developed Starswarm dx12 demo in 2 months. Starswarm would have similar performance gains on Xbox one i.e 600%. They have something major at GDC in the Microsoft booth.
-Stardock are developing DX12 game engine “Nitrous”. Star Control game will make sense console. They will license it to 3rd parties in future after they release 2 games on Nitrous engine.
-Phil Spencer managing expectations, as in November with DX12 on Xbox….. the games released then wont look much different then until the new DX 12 game engines.

The Inner Circle special - DX12 Tech Talk with Brad Wardell