DirectX 12 Coming to Xbox One thread, v. 2

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starlight777 said:
http://www.neowin.net/news/directx-12-a-game-changer-for-xbox-one

DirectX 12: A game changer for Xbox One

This week at Build, Microsoft unveiled their new graphics stack, DirectX 12, which was demonstrated to more than double performance on existing hardware and work on all Microsoft platforms.

Earlier this year, AMD's new Mantle platform demonstrated what was possible if the graphics stack could effectively utilize all the cores on modern CPUs. The result was a massive boost in performance in Mantle enabled games with very little developer effort as shown by Oxide Games and Battlefield 4. The challenge for AMD is that Mantle is currently PC only and restricted to recent AMD video cards. If only there was a graphics stack that supported multi-core processing that worked on all video cards...

Xbox One gets a major upgrade

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Xbox One has been well received but has been criticized for being measurably behind Sony's Playstation 4 in terms of game performance. Microsoft has responded with DirectX 12. With relatively little effort by developers, upcoming Xbox One games, PC Games and Windows Phone games will see a doubling in graphics performance.

Suddenly, that Xbox One game that struggled at 720p will be able to reach fantastic performance at 1080p. For developers, this is a game changer.

The Secret Sauce

Microsoft was able to achieve the performance breakthroughs through two major changes to DirectX 12:
1.Bundles
2.Parallel rendering

Most of the performance gain is a result of DirectX 12 making full use of multiple CPU cores. For example, on DirectX 11 a typical game would perform like this:

http://draginol.stardock.net/images2014/AdventuresinDirectX12_10589/image_6.jpg

As you can see, thread 0 (the starting thread for the game) is doing most of the work. In fact, DirectX 11 is barely being utilized by the other threads.

But on DirectX 12, the situation changes dramatically:
http://draginol.stardock.net/images2014/AdventuresinDirectX12_10589/image_7.jpg


Not only is DirectX 12 more efficient in its own right but the interaction with the GPU is evenly spread between each CPU core.
http://draginol.stardock.net/images2014/AdventuresinDirectX12_10589/image_2.jpg

The results are spectacular. Not just in theory but in practice (full disclosure: I am involved with the Star Swarm demo which makes use of this kind of technology.) While each generation of video card struggles to gain substantial performance over the previous generation, here, the same hardware will suddenly see a doubling of performance.

XBox One is the biggest beneficiary; it effectively gives every Xbox One owner a new GPU that is twice as fast as the old one.



No free lunch

There is a downside for all this power. DirectX 12 games will be the first games to fully utilize the powerful graphics cards gamers have been buying for the past few years. DirectX 12 won't require a new video card for GPUs that already support DirectX 11. As a result, that GPU will be getting pushed twice as hard as it previously was which means more heat on cards that might have only barely been cool enough when they were only being commanded by a single CPU core. We expect to see many marginal video cards setup to experience over heating issues as DirectX 12 suddenly pushes these cards beyond what the IHV had anticipated.

In addition, while DirectX 11 was a relatively plug and play experience for developers, DirectX 12 puts a much greater emphasis on developer control. Developers can and are expected to manage conflicts and low level pipelining to make the most of the new platform. This is a good thing for experienced graphics developers but will put less experienced developers at a disadvantage.

DirectX Unleashed

Not content to merely double performance, Microsoft also announced that they were going to make DirectX 12 available on Xbox One, Windows Phone and Windows PC. This means a single graphics API for multiple platforms. In addition, Microsoft indicated that they were making DirectX 12 their go-to solution for all graphics intensive tasks -- not just games.

Microsoft hasn't provided a release date for DirectX 12 but we expect to hear more at E3 this Spring.
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Well hot damn! This is good news.
 
Isnt this the first time software has a significant on hardware to this degree? I dont think Ive ever heard of anything like this. Also, reading up on the Cloud, I can see how Microsoft would state the XBO could last ten years as developers get better and better with this technology. Pretty exciting stuff to be sure....:)

It does seem like the XBO was designed much different than other consoles in the past. It truly seems like a whole new direction to me. Between offloading to the Cloud, Tiled resources and DX12, they clearly believe power to be something that shouldn't only be accessed locally, but outside of the box as well. Hence, while on paper the XBO may seem like the weaker of the two but when you add all the features as was intended, the X1 seems more like it was created to work from the outside (Azure/Cloud) but still be able to operate as a local assistant towards that particular type of technology. Both working in tandem together, to make sure there is ALWAYS enough power to do what ever developers wanted to do creatively for a long time, before we begin to see visuals become somewhat stagnant.

Now maybe just one of these features would have a worthy impact on performance, but all of it DEFINITELY seems to be a significant increase. Crazy...:crazy:

I've never cared about what resolution or FPS were in games. I just wanted so desperately to get rid of the wax museum with a pulse, look. I've been more than happy with what we've seen thusfar as that's no longer an issue.
 
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So what this is telling us is MS had a plan for xb1? Something a little more complicated then doubling the ram? What angles could the SDF take to fill this latest claim full of holes?
 
jimmyD said:
So what this is telling us is MS had a plan for xb1? Something a little more complicated then doubling the ram? What angles could the SDF take to fill this latest claim full of holes?
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The GPU inside that other console is more powerful than Cloud, DX 12 and Tiled Resources put together?! AAAAANNND!!!!, as developers get better with that GPU, games will increase from 1080p, to 1082.05.....uh,.....p?!:eek:

....This of course would give the competing console the edge, thus, negating ALLLLLLLLLLLL of the XBO features mute and pointless to the degree of N64 type visuals!!!! :eek:


...Gat dayum! I just threw up in my own mowf a lil' bit. :confused:
 
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Don't leave food out for the bears, come on now.

If DX12 changes the game, which at this point is slightly plausible; it's going to be c razy for PC's and Consoles.
 
Variance said:
Don't leave food out for the bears, come on now.

If DX12 changes the game, which at this point is slightly plausible; it's going to be c razy for PC's and Consoles.
Click to expand...
yogi.jpg
 
Unless Microsoft announces information at E3 to the contrary, Direct X 12 won't be implemented into the X1 until late 2015. So unless MS gives developers the tech long before then to start making games, we wont see any of DX12's benefits until 2016. Until then, here's hoping that tiled resources, a better understanding of how to use the esram, and the new development tools are enough to help the system fulfill its current potential. Im almost sure the X1 will see the benefits of dx12 before any other platform though. Microsoft may just be fast tacking it at this point.
 
Thing is, it's probably been available to developers and them allowing to state as such in comparison to just now being announced to the public.
 
jimmyD said:
So what this is telling us is MS had a plan for xb1? Something a little more complicated then doubling the ram? What angles could the SDF take to fill this latest claim full of holes?
Click to expand...
Who cares? Just shove them back into their den of ill health.
 
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I wouldn't be surprised if the next Halo ( ntm Gears and the next Crackdown) is the first game to benefit from this. It is their flagship series afterall, only makes sense for it to be a showcase for this tech.
 
Phil Spencer Chimes in:




So now its, Amd, Intel, Nvidia, Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock, developer at Oxide games, and occasional MS hater), and now the head of XBOX. The haters can hate all they want, but the tides are turning.

One thing I keep reading is that any increase in efficiency XBOX ONE gets the PS4 will get because they are the same chip at the core, it's just PS4 has more of it. That is so wrong It's not even funny. The system was built around DX12, all the modifications to the hardware were built around getting the most out of the system.

All GPUs have bottlenecks and inefficiencies, MS added micro controllers that the PS4 does not have to mitigate these inefficiencies. Think of the XBOX hardware modifications as unified shaders, but on a bigger scale, without unified shaders the PS3 would have had a better GPU.
 
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xbgamer7 said:
Phil Spencer Chimes in:


One thing I keep reading is that any increase in efficiency XBOX ONE gets the PS4 will get because they are the same chip at the core, it's just PS4 has more of it. That is so wrong It's not even funny. .
Click to expand...



Yeah, so very wrong... LOL

Really, the Sony camps are HOPING their API's will be optimized, but all this time MS weren't the idiots that the public gaming front thought. They had the system designed how they wanted, it is just the software wasn't in place.

We will see DX12 benefits well before 2015, since Devs can get early access to the software, but the software won't be FINAL until 2015... so even at the early stages, the DX12 games will be lesser in performance than after the full release.

It will be curious to see how much can be squeezed out of OpenGL since the PS4 CANNOT run DX12 full, or at all. People laughed at Penello when he said MS wouldn't give up that much of a performance gap... guess he is being proven right.
 
In the talk that Frank Savage did at Build, he mentioned that they were "testing/verifying" (sorry don't remember his exact words) DX12 features on the X1 first before adding them into the API.
 
With all the news and conferences lately about cloud and DX12, I highly doubt the impact of these for X1 will be negligible. I'm not expecting humongous gainers, but I think it's safe to say the impact will lead to noticeable/moderately impressive improvements.
 
Zcythe said:
In the talk that Frank Savage did at Build, he mentioned that they were "testing/verifying" (sorry don't remember his exact words) DX12 features on the X1 first before adding them into the API.
Click to expand...

Yes, they are testing it right now for the exclusive partition, XB1 will get it sooner than pc
 
Zcythe said:
In the talk that Frank Savage did at Build, he mentioned that they were "testing/verifying" (sorry don't remember his exact words) DX12 features on the X1 first before adding them into the API.
Click to expand...
"Testing" it on 1st party games in development, I'd assume. I'll bet they've been "testing" for a while now for 2015 releases, and even possibly late 2014 games.

I think Quantum Break looks like a contender... but that's just my opinion. It has always been that game no one can believe is real-time, even when the developer says so.
 
like I said SOny have their hardware set and cant upgrade them but MS can with Software many times over and it shows.
 
DarkPassenger said:
How does software upgrade hardware? You realize this is impossible, right?
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Kind sir, you have no idea what you are talking about. You can download gpus through the internet these days. Hell I just sent the ramz over my wifi network to my xbox 1. I now have 16 gigs of stacked ddr4 ram that I downloaded earlier.

Microsoft is going to let us download a R9 290x with dx12 right into the xbox one's power supply.

Just wait and see!
 
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markis5150 said:
Start by reading the articles in this discusion maybe.
And maybe try and return that PS4 you bought this week eh?
:cool:
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maybe remove them fanboy goggles and realize what nervus said makes zero sense.

how is ps4's hardware set but not the xbox one's? How can you magically download new hardware over the internet via software?

because that's exactly what nervus's post says.

Now, if he wants to say that the ps4's software is set, while the xbox 1's is updatable, well then, that makes a bit more sense. But, then you have to ask the question, how do you know the ps4's software is not updatable lol.
 
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Your reading it to much.
Everybody knows you can't upgrade hardware over internet.

What I am saying is that Sony is a hardware company and they did the ps4 and now its out on stores. That is it they can't upgrade that hardware. That goes the same for MS. The real difference is the Sony is not a software company but MS is king and they will use software to make a big difference between them.

MS can keep upgrading their software over and over again. Look what they did with the Xbox 360. They will always be ahead of the game.
 
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Nervusbreakdown said:
Your reading it to much.
Everybody knows you can't upgrade hardware over internet.

What I am saying is that Sony is a hardware company and they did the ps4 and now its out on stores. That is it they can't upgrade that hardware. That goes the same for MS. The real difference is the Sony is not a software company but MS is king and they will use software to make a big difference between them.

MS can keep upgrading their software over and over again. Look what they did with the Xbox 360. They will always be ahead of the game.
Click to expand...

*Sigh*...you mean updating. You can't upgrade software. The thing is OpenGL/OpenCL, the API Sony uses, is fully capable as DX12 is set to be. This means the Xbox 1 and the PS4 will nearly have visual parity, depending on developer support.

As a PC gamer foremost, DX12 is everything we wanted out of the OpenGL API. That's if MS doesn't pull another DX10 fiasco.
 
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Suerly we can all agree that DX12 is quite a bit more of a game changer than we all expected it to be before build last week.
ZombiesRUCrazy
You are slightly on the defensive because you have been banging on since Team Xbox about the X1 gpu being just a 1.3 tf gpu and you were 100% right, I can tell Puresouls used to drive you crazy with all his talk about dgpu's. You was right and he was wrong. Period. But, no one could see this coming, how much of a game changer DX12 looks like it's going to be.
You quite clearly are pretty knowledgeable when it comes to tech, certainly more than me but come on now, you knew what nervus was trying to say and you clearly took it out of context. You own an X1 right? So you're clearly no fanboy. Just accept that nobody including yourself could see this one coming so there's no need to get on the defensive, MS had a plan all along and the veil is slowly being lifted. This is not a dig at you, I have backed you up before concerning how we felt slightly let down with the gpu MS put in X1 but I wish you could just admit to yourself that MS seem to have pulled off the unexpected and released a lower powered console that at the very least will come very close to the PS4 with the right software, would love to see you use your knowledge in the coming months to dig deeper into DX12 and share with people like me who isn't tech savvy so I can once more be excited for the coming generation. :)
 
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