‘DirectX 12 can halve power consumption or increase fps by half’

Intel showed a Surface Pro 3 with the upcoming DirectX 12 installed during a demonstration. The tablet could achieve up to fifty percent more frames per second thanks to the new API. Energy consumption can be halved in certain scenarios.

The demonstration of DirectX 12 was held at the Siggraph 2014 trade show. Intel showed a graphical demo in which 50,000 asteroids form an asteroid field. The demo was run on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 tablet, which uses an Intel HD4400 GPU. While the demo was running, it was possible to switch between a DirectX 11 and 12 mode. When showing exactly the same images, DirectX 12 managed to halve the energy consumption. If the framelock was removed from the demo, the number of frames per second would increase by fifty percent if the same amount of energy was consumed as in DirectX 11 mode.

DirectX 12 manages to achieve speed gains or energy savings thanks to low-level access to the GPU. This relieves the CPU and makes the hardware less hot. Not only can this benefit Windows systems, but potentially the Xbox One as well.

Microsoft has not yet released DirectX 12. However, there is an Early Access Program that allows developers to experiment with the new api, which can partly be seen as Microsoft’s answer to AMD’s Mantle. Incidentally, the Khronos Group, responsible for the OpenGL standard, is also working on enabling low-level access to the GPU in a future API.