A new update on Rise of the Tomb Raider on PC now lets you have DirectX 12 support. Only through Windows 10 via Steam, but will arrive in the Widows 10 store pretty soon. So what does this mean exactly? Well in a new Tomb Raider blog post, Nixxes Software Head Jurjen Katsman explains how DirectX 12 will improve the quality of Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Jurjen first starts explaining deeply on how DirectX 12 will improve how your PC will run the game.
“We can leverage every single hardware feature and every bit of CPU power available in the most efficient way possible. With DirectX 12 we are taking a massive step forwards for bringing a lot of that flexibility to the PC as well. For Rise of the Tomb Raider the largest gain DirectX 12 will give us is the ability to spread our CPU rendering work over all CPU cores, without introducing additional overhead. This is especially important on 8-core CPUs like Intel i7’s or many AMD FX processors.”
He even goes into further detail about the technical functions that will help your PC run Rise of the Tomb Raider
“When using DirectX 11, in situations where the game is under heavy load – for example in the larger hubs of the game – the individual cores may not be able to feed a fast GPU like an NVIDIA GTX 980 or even NVIDIA GTX 970 quick enough. This means the game may not hit the desired frame-rate, requiring you to turn down settings that impact CPU performance. Even though the game can use all your CPU cores, the majority of the DirectX 11 related work is all happening on a single core. With DirectX 12 a lot of the work is spread over many cores, and the framerate of the game will run at can be much higher for the same settings.”
This slide below is an overview of how your CPU load will be distributed if it runs on DirectX 11 or 12.
The blog also mentions that when Rise of the tomb Raider is played on DirectX 11 it averages about 48 frames-per-second, when on DirectX 12 it can go up to 60 FPS. Jurjen also explained how asynchronous compute will reuse GPU power that would otherwise go to waste, and do more tasks. DirectX 12 will basically give complete control of hardware and software to the developers so they can improve the game much more. The blog also stats that Rise of the Tomb Raider is one of the first games to use DirectX 12. It will allow people with “lower-quality” and “higher-quality” rigs to run Rise of the Tomb Raider better, by getting higher FPS and overall higher settings. More patches and updates will allow PC and Xbox to use these settings.
More games will run DirectX 12 in the future, allowing a narrower gap in the specs you need to play games.
