As we’ve reported back in, Blizzard has added DX12 support to World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth via patch 8.0. However, it appears that the initial DX12 results were not that ideal as DX11 was still outperforming it. Instead of sitting idle, though, Blizzard decided to improve CPU multi-thread under Microsoft’s latest API and its upcoming patch 8.1 will bring significant performance improvements.
Patch 8.1 is currently available on the PTR server and Wowhead has contacted some benchmarks between version 8.0 and version 8.1. Wowhead used an Intel i7 8700k @ 5GHz with an MSI Nvidia GTX 1070 (at stock speeds) and 32GB of DDR4 RAM.
Thanks to the new DX12 CPU optimizations, Battle for Azeroth saw a 23% improvement over DX11 in 1080p and a 16% improvement in 4K. It’s no secret that World of Warcraft has always been a CPU-bound title and these results show why most developers should start implementing DX12 – and Vulkan – to their games. You hear that Ubisoft?
Those interested in testing the new DX12 CPU optimizations can do so by downloading the patch from the PTR server, selecting the DirectX 12 API and then adding the following lines to the end of your Config.wtf file, located inside the WTF folder in your PTR installation:
SET gxMTPrepass “1”
SET gxMTOpaque “1”
SET gxMTDisable “0”
SET gxMTBeginDraw “1”
SET gxMTShadow “1”
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.”
Contact: Email