according to this article more cores could boot your performance dramatically
time.com/3975043/windows-10-microsoft-gamers/
The number one reason gamers should consider Windows 10
DirectX is how games talk to your computer, the crucial “application programming interface” that rests like a byzantine traffic signal between the way a studio wants a game to look and play and the hardware under the hood. DirectX has been with us since Windows 95, and Wardell says DirectX 12, the dozenth iteration of the toolset, is as crucial a rethink as Windows 95 itself was when it debuted two decades ago.
“DirectX 11 and before were all made before we had multicore CPUs,” say Wardell. “So at the end of the day, all your games were talking to your video card via one core.” That, for modern CPUs now readily sporting four, six or eight cores, creates an enormous bottleneck. However fast your video card might be, that single-core limitation means games often wind up log-jammed by the CPU. It’s a head-scratcher Wardell says Microsoft’s finally solved with DirectX 12.
“In DirectX 12, every single one of your cores can talk to your graphics card simultaneously,” says Wardell. “So in our benchmarks, going from DirectX 11-optimized games, we’re seeing between 85% and 300% performance boosts.” Those kinds of leaps, any way you want to slice them, are huge.
Mind you, the game has to be written for DirectX 12, something you won’t see much of as Windows 10 launches. In fact Wardell believes his upcoming Kurzweilian homage, Ashes of the Singularity, a real-time strategy game and potential genre-upender that can juggle thousands of units simultaneously, will be the first. It’s due to be playable via Steam Early Access next month (It’s also, incidentally, the first game with a DirectX 12 benchmark, adds Wardell.)
But it’ll likely have company very soon. Wardell says it’s “not hard” to go to DirectX 12, and that his developers made the shift with relative ease. “These high-end games, like Unreal Engine or CryEngine, you know, your first-person shooters and such, they will probably have DirectX 12 versions very shortly. And when they arrive, we’re talking about a pretty huge, instantaneous performance boost.”
The older your system, the more DirectX 12 matters
It sounds counterintuitive, but Wardell told me the performance gains with DirectX 12 will be greater the slower your CPU is. That, to put it simply, is just a reflection of how big a deal activating all those idle cores turns out to be.
“The older your box, the better Windows 10 is,” says Wardell. “So if you have like a Core i5 [Intel’s mid-range CPU series] with a decent video card, you’ll actually see a bigger gain than if you have some monster Core i7 high-end CPU.”
Again, the game has to be DirectX 12 aware to benefit, but it’s a fascinating, hugely ironic Windows 10 wrinkle that its chief beneficiaries may be gamers running older multicore hardware.
DirectX 12 uses a lot less power
“Because it’s using all your cores, DirectX 12 uses a lot less power,” says Wardell. “Whenever you max out a core, you’re using a lot more power overall than if you’re distributing the load across multiple cores. So that means big power savings, especially for laptop gamers where battery life becomes a vital factor.”
The unanticipated flip side of this, Wardell tells me, is that DirectX 12’s core repurposing could actually harm extreme-end overclocked PCs. “Here’s a sneak preview of the first scandal,” jokes Wardell. “All these people who overclocked their machines could in theory wind up frying their computers, because with all those cores going all out, your PC’s going to run way hotter.”
Windows 10 turns your single video card PC into a twofer
How many video cards do you have in your PC? Think carefully (I didn’t, and told Wardell, who asked me the same question, just one). Wardell reminded me most modern PCs have at least two (not counting extremely high-end systems with cards run in tandem, in which case the number would be three or more).
“Everyone forgets about the integrated graphics card on the motherboard that you’d never use for gaming if you have a dedicated video card,” says Wardell. “With DirectX 12, you can fold in that integrated card as a seamless coprocessor. The game doesn’t have to do anything special, save support DirectX 12 and have that feature enabled. As a developer I don’t have to figure out which thing goes to what card, I just turn it on and DirectX 12 takes care of it.”
Wardell notes the performance boost from pulling in the integrated video card is going to be heavily dependent on the specific combination—the performance gap between integrated video cards over the past half-decade isn’t small—but at the high end, he says it could be as significant as DirectX 12’s ability to tap the idle cores in your CPU. Add the one on top of the other and, if he’s right, the shift at a developmental level starts to sound like that rare confluence of evolutionary plus the letter ‘r’.
DirectX 12’s benefits are going to be greater for PCs than consoles
Microsoft’s Xbox One is supposed to get Windows 10 at some point yet this year, but Wardell says DirectX 12’s benefits are mostly PC-centric. “This is going to make the PC pull away from the consoles quite a bit,” says Wardell. “It’s not that Windows 10 is so great, by the way, but that Windows 8 and below were nerfed. When the benchmarks start showing up in a week or so, it’s going to be so extreme, I think a lot of people are going to think they’re fake.”
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