Did you know the Xbox one's CPU is actually more powerful than the PS4? It's just the graphics card that has less gflops of computing power; but you know what? Xbox has DirectX 12. This will let developers utilize the beefier CPU of the Xbox while reducing the strain on the GPU.
It's almost as if Microsoft knew this would eventually happen because at the last minute they decided to put in a more powerful CPU.
You may be wondering:
"What will the Xbox One be able to do with DirectX 12 and how??"
Well here's what you will see have an increase:
- Draw distance
- Frame Rate
- Light sources
- Big performance gains
How is this possible, you may be thinking.
It's all down to How DirectX 12 works. Normally with DirectX 11 the CPU cores could only talk to ONE GPU core at a time. This is why even with multi threaded games you still would have core 0 at max power while the others would be much, much lower. Now with DirectX 12 all the CPU cores and GPU cores can communicate all at once, thus utilizing all the power of all the cores if needed (see graph below) This will be a tremendous gain in speed which translates directly into a frame rate bump; and a slight reduction to stuttering.
Less calls to the cores means a better draw distance because you don't have to wait for each gpu to start rendering it. They can all be rendering it at once because the CPU will be telling all the GPU cores to start rendering at once.
Here's a big one though: light sources. Photo realism in video games hinges on light sources, scattering light, and diffusing light. With directX 11 developers are stuck with only 4 light sources! That is insane! Developers have some tricks to get the most out of that, but 4 isn't even close to enough for photo realistic games. That's where DirectX 12 comes in. DirectX 12 will give us "Limitless light sources" according to Anandtech.
DirectX 12 will give the Xbox One a HUGE performance increase. Some sources say 30% some say 50%. They are going off of one thing or another that DirectX 12 is and not looking at the whole picture. DirectX 12 is a huge leap in performance and we don't know exactly how much better our games will be but I can tell you getting games to 60fps will be easier, games will look stunning, and Xbox owners will be very satisfied.
For more info check out these videos by THE RED DRAGON:
