Earlier this week at Built, a Developers Conference hosted by Microsoft, game developer and Stardock CEO Brad Wardell explained how DirectX 12 would benefit the PC and Xbox One. However, it was his statements regarding the performance boost that the Xbox One in particular that are generating the most buzz.
“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.”
Of course, because statements as definitive as “it effectively gives every Xbox One owner a new GPU that is twice as fast as the old one,” some people took to twitter in order to get some clarification regarding these claims.
@XX__MX it’s not literally (it’s software, not hardware) but yes, dx12 games will likely by more than 2x as fast.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 4, 2014
Again, because Wardell’s statements were so polarizing and matter-of-fact (such are the effects of a 140 character limit), once again his responses were called into questioned.
@Zunderholz @XX__MX it didn’t. It was/is still basically a single core stack. With DX12 all 8 cores will be able to split the work.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 5, 2014
These statements have are very similar to the statements begin made by several industry professionals. AMD’s Raja Khodury had this to say regarding the benefits DirectX 12 will have on Xbox One:
“And it’s not a small benefit. It’s… like getting four generations of hardware ahead with this API.”
Intel’s VP of Engineering, Eric Mentezer, echoed the above, stating:
“This is absolutely, I think, the most significant jump in technology in a long, long time.”
Nvidia’s VP of Content and Technology, Tony Tamasi, had this to say regarding the improvements DirectX 12 will bring to the table:
“… existing cards will see orders of magnitude improvements from DirectX 12′s release, going from hundreds of thousands to millions and maybe tens of millions of system draws in a second.”
Because of the statements from these industry professionals, along with the recent confirmation that both Wolfenstein: The New Order and Murdered: Soul Suspect will be running at identical resolutions/frame-rates on the Xbox One/PS4, it’s clear to see that resolutiongate is finally coming to a close. Now we can all get back to arguing about what truly matters – personal opinions that we shouldn’t be arguing over in the first place.
