There are a lot of technical differences between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, but performance is king. You can read about these in our breakdown of DirectX, but they include ray tracing and variable rate shading, among other visual and performance features.
This prioritization can shave minor bits of latency in thousands of places, making your games run much faster overall.įinally, DirectX 12 also supports a range of features from DirectX 12 Ultimate. For example, your CPU can execute an introduction to receive textures from memory and move on to executing another function (like AI for a character) without waiting for that memory instruction to finish. Asynchronous compute allows your hardware to continue operations without waiting for another operation to complete. This is similar to parallel compute, but they’re not the same thing. Similarly, DirectX 12 opens up the possibility of asynchronous operations. Parallel compute opens up the option for developers to make multiple calls at the same time, vastly improving the efficiency of operations. DirectX 11 handles serial operations, which means there’s a single queue of operations that execute in order. As we’ll get to next, DirectX 12 performs better than DirectX 11 in most games.Īnother significant change in DirectX 12 is parallel compute. However, developers have targeted DirectX 12 more - ahem - directly over the past several years and squeezed out more optimizations. In turn, it’s also more difficult for developers to work with.Īt launch, DirectX 12 actually showed slightly lower performance than DirectX 11, mainly on the back of its complexity. In short, DirectX 12 allows game developers to target optimizations closer to the hardware, reducing the overhead incurred from the API and graphics driver. It’s an important distinction between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. Low-level APIs are closer to the hardware, while high-level APIs are further away and more generalized. There are various layers between your game and your hardware. DirectX 11: what’s the difference? The use of raytracing in Battlefield V.īetween DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, the most important difference is that DirectX 11 is a high-level API, while DirectX 12 is a low-level API. API overhead can represent a significant difference in performance while playing games, so while it may seem fine to use whatever version of DirectX you want, it can be one of the most important settings to tweak. As you can see in our breakdown of the Vulkan API, it provides better performance than DirectX in most games. Not all graphics APIs are built equally, however. Returnal PC: best settings, ray tracing, Steam Deck, and more The best processors for gaming: AMD and Intel face off
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