Thuway: DirectX 12 Is Not Xbox One Savior

During the Game Developers Conference 2014 at San Francisco, Microsoft announced the twelfth iteration in DirectX graphics libraries. DirectX 12 is expected to be released in Holiday 2015 and it will work across multiple platforms, from PC (Windows 8) to Windows Phone 8.1. The big news is that since DirectX 12 will be compatible with existing hardware such as nVidia Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell cards and AMD GCN based cards, even the Xbox One, which features a GCN derived AMD GPU, is supported.

 

Microsoft added that this will bring some performance improvements for Xbox One. This sparked some hope in those fans that are currently underwhelmed by the console’s hardware, which has brought lower quality versions of multiplatform games in comparison to the main rival, PlayStation 4. However, industry insider Ahsan Rasheed (Thuway) explained via Twitter why DirectX 12 can’t possibly save Xbox One, at least in this regard.

He has a point, as consoles have historically been forced to use low level APIs in order to take advantage of the fixed hardware, while PCs have relied on hardware brute force. The main benefits of DirectX 12 will undoubtedly be seen on PC, and clearly the thinner, more efficient API has been modeled in response to AMD‘s Mantle; however, it is unlikely that Xbox One will be able to ever match PlayStation 4 since the hardware is clearly inferior, and it is doubtful that DirectX12 alone will bring significant improvements. It’s more likely that developers will find better ways to handle the ESRam, but after all, there is only so much work-around that they can do via software.

 

Microsoft showed Forza Motorsport 5 running at 60FPS on a DirectX 12 PC; apparently, it took a team of four men just four months to make the port, but it has been stressed that this is just a tech demo and there are no plans to release the game on PC.

You can check the footage below: