Wardell On Why Companies Don’t Promote DX12 Benefits More

Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has been very vocal about DX12 benefits in the past few months. Being one of the first studios that has invested in the tech, during GDC 2015 Wardell demonstrated Ashes of the Singularity, a DX12-enabled RTS game; Ashes of the Singularity features several thousand units on screen and each shot or explosion has its own light source.

After looking at the presentations coming out of GDC 2015, it’s clear that DirectX 12 is a major improvement over DX11 and most importantly, it finally allows to exploit the true capabilities of multicore CPUs in ways that previously just weren’t possible. And yet we don’t exactly hear companies shouting such things from the rooftops; in an interview with NicheGamer, Wardell provided his own explanation on why that’s currently the case.

What I hope most users get, I’ve had a lot of meetings with Microsoft, AMD, and a little bit of Nvidia and Intel – they really need to hit home the fact that DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, allow all of the cores of your CPU to talk to the video card simultaneously. But everyone’s really iffy about that, because that means acknowledging that for the past several years, only one of your cores was talking to the GPU, and no one wants to go ‘You know by the way, you know that multi-core CPU? It was useless for your games.’ Alright? No one wants to be that guy. People wonder, saying ‘Gosh, doesn’t it seem like PC games have stalled? I wonder why that is?’ Well, the speed of a single core on a computer has not changed in years. It’s been at 3GHz, or 2-something GHz for years, I mean that’s not the only thing that affects the speed, but you get the idea. Now, with DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, it’s how many cores you’ve got. We’ve got lots of those. Suddenly, you go by 4x, 5x, the performance.

That’s another thing, quit with this 20% boost crap. They all know it, and off the record I’ve had people tell me if they say the real numbers, there will be people who just believe it’s marketing fluff. Well, bring them over to your booth, show them, and go ‘Look, here’s DirectX 11, here’s DirectX 12. This is running at 8 frames a second, this is running at 60 frames a second.’ It’s straightforward, but no one wants to admit it. Anandtech did, they showed it, they did their benchmarks.

That actually makes complete sense, although it’s a bit sad. The truth of the matter is that the potential of PC hardware has been largely wasted so far, mainly because of the inability to let each CPU core access the GPU independently; the companies would have to admit this first before going all-out about DX12 benefits.

 

At any rate, better late than never, right?