The first TRUE DX12 title (DualShockers)

[Carfax83]

What do Battlefield 1, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Hitman 2016, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ashes of the Singularity, Quantum Break all have in common?

None of them are true DX12 titles. With the possible exception of Ashes of the Singularity, they are built with DX12 as an afterthought. AotS is perhaps the only current DX12 title with a solid investment in the DX12 rendering path, and it shows in the performance increase over DX11 for both AMD and NVidia. And whilst most DX12 titles run faster for AMD, they are still on average slower for NVidia because NVidia's DX11 driver does such a good job of exploiting parallelism and reducing CPU overhead. So to get great DX12 performance on NVidia hardware, developers have to work much harder.

I always said though that it would take approximately two years for DX12 to really take off. But I didn't know that we'd see a fully fledged DX12 title so soon. So what is this title you might ask? I'm sure it will surprise you..

Gears of War 4.

According to DualShockers, Gears of War 4 is built from the ground up for DX12, and unlike Quantum Break, it cannot even be backported to DX11 because it leverages so many of DX12's core features, and at a deep level.

This probably shows in the settings menu, which is extremely comprehensive to put it mildly. Gears of War 4 will also use some very sophisticated graphical effects like real time dynamic global illumination for certain light sources like flashlights.

All in all, Gears of War 4 is shaping up to be this year's graphical powerhouse sleeper hit

 

[IEC]

Will we finally get proper multi-GPU support?

 

[Carfax83]

Will we finally get proper multi-GPU support?

Well I don't know about "proper" multi-GPU support, but the game does support multi GPU according to the settings menu, along with asynchronous compute. There are toggle switches for both of them.

 

[ConsoleLover]

Yeap and not only does DX12 allow for greater performance if done right, it also allows for MUCH better visual quality. Developers can really turn up the quality of graphics immensely.

In fact with DX12 and 4k 144hz HDR monitors in 3 years time we are going to be seeing just incredible graphical fidelity, something when compared to today's games would look like night and day.

I suspect Gears of War 4 will take full advantage of AMD's fully DX12 design in their Polaris graphics and I'm expecting anywhere from 10% to 15% better performance for the RX 480 8GB over the GTX 1060 6GB.

 

[Carfax83]

^^ You should probably keep your expectations in check. Unreal Engine 4 runs best on NVidia hardware, similar to how Hitman's Glacier engine runs well on AMD hardware. Though that's not to say that I think Gears of War 4 will run poorly on AMD hardware, because from what I've been reading, the DX12 implementation is very thorough, which should be beneficial to AMD.

 

[ConsoleLover]

^^ You should probably keep your expectations in check. Unreal Engine 4 runs best on NVidia hardware, similar to how Hitman's Glacier engine runs well on AMD hardware. Though that's not to say that I think Gears of War 4 will run poorly on AMD hardware, because from what I've been reading, the DX12 implementation is very thorough, which should be beneficial to AMD.

Yes, Unreal DX11 implementation heavily favour Nvidia, but since they are implementing GOW 4 completely from the ground up in DX12 I expect 15% to 20% faster performance from AMD's cards compared to Nvidia's.

 

[Unreal123]

Yes, Unreal DX11 implementation heavily favour Nvidia, but since they are implementing GOW 4 completely from the ground up in DX12 I expect 15% to 20% faster performance from AMD's cards compared to Nvidia's.

Even if Nvidia do not optimize the game with the source code still RX 480 will not beat GTX 1060 because UE 4 was built on Nvidia and has native NVAPI.

 

[Alqoxzt]

^^ You should probably keep your expectations in check. Unreal Engine 4 runs best on NVidia hardware, similar to how Hitman's Glacier engine runs well on AMD hardware. Though that's not to say that I think Gears of War 4 will run poorly on AMD hardware, because from what I've been reading, the DX12 implementation is very thorough, which should be beneficial to AMD.

Yeah right,
but optimization for the x1 might do some good for radeons and they wont end up way behind like in other ue4 games.

 

[Unreal123]

Yeah right,
but optimization for the x1 might do some good for radeons and they wont end up way behind like in other ue4 games.

Whatever they do to optimize for AMD still it lacks in native support. The Engine is build from the ground up on Nvidia.

 

[Alqoxzt]

Whatever they do to optimize for AMD still it lacks in native support. The Engine is build from the ground up on Nvidia.

yeah that is the problem but there is still a chance that AMD wont be far behind and will improve with patches.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

Depends on what you mean by the definition of "TRUE" ...

It won't even use shader model 6 which will largely mean no improvement compared to writing your shaders for D3D11 ...

 

[Carfax83]

Depends on what you mean by the definition of "TRUE" ...

It won't even use shader model 6 which will largely mean no improvement compared to writing your shaders for D3D11 ...

By true I mean that it has no DX11 fallback. It's built for DX12 from the ground up.

 

[Azix]

Haven't seen much impressive about the game on the graphics side. Even if it is built with dx12 from the ground up (not sure how that is possible) its still unreal engine. At best the character models will look good.

Microsoft needs to stop using unreal and get their own engine.

 

[psolord]

If this will be windows store only, then good bye.

 

[dogen1]

Haven't seen much impressive about the game on the graphics side. Even if it is built with dx12 from the ground up (not sure how that is possible) its still unreal engine. At best the character models will look good.

Microsoft needs to stop using unreal and get their own engine.

Well, the main target is the xb1, so that limits how the game will look somewhat.

 

[Arachnotronic]

If this will be windows store only, then good bye.

Yep, no Steam = very unlikely that I will buy it.

 

[Carfax83]

Haven't seen much impressive about the game on the graphics side. Even if it is built with dx12 from the ground up (not sure how that is possible) its still unreal engine. At best the character models will look good.

Microsoft needs to stop using unreal and get their own engine.

Most games that utilize the UE4 engine are indie titles or mainstream games. This, along with Paragon is the first AAA game that will utilize UE4, so it will definitely be a stunner. Have you seen Paragon? It looks amazing! UE4 has the best PBR I think of any engine..

Don't know why you think Microsoft should drop UE, as it's the best and most flexible 3D engine available at the moment..

 

[Carfax83]

Yep, no Steam = very unlikely that I will buy it.

There's a first time for everything Although I like Steam, I don't believe in supporting monopolization.

 

[Yakk]

Haven't seen much impressive about the game on the graphics side. Even if it is built with dx12 from the ground up (not sure how that is possible) its still unreal engine. At best the character models will look good.

Microsoft needs to stop using unreal and get their own engine.

Yeah, Microsoft Studios needs to do something to differentiate their top tier games from mainstream games from other developers. They have several high profile games which should be a notch above and a custom engine would be a big step towards that since Microsoft has all the talent they need to do this anyways.

 

[tviceman]

Yeah, Microsoft Studios needs to do something to differentiate their top tier games from mainstream games from other developers. They have several high profile games which should be a notch above and a custom engine would be a big step towards that since Microsoft has all the talent they need to do this anyways.

I disagree. The talent to build state of the art top notch engines has consolidated in the past few years. Coupled with the complexity of building a new engine from scratch today makes it a highly expensive and time consuming process. Microsoft has never put out a top tier first party engine.

 

[Carfax83]

I disagree. The talent to build state of the art top notch engines has consolidated in the past few years. Coupled with the complexity of building a new engine from scratch today makes it a highly expensive and time consuming process. Microsoft has never put out a top tier first party engine.

Indeed. The cost and effort to develop a 3D engine from scratch that can rival the likes of UE4, CryEngine, Frostbite 3 etcetera would be monumental. Plus, all the previous Gears titles were developed using UE3. Gears 4 being developed on UE4 is just logical, as many former Epic employees now work for The Coalition (which is owned by Microsoft), and Microsoft themselves are a big sponsor of Epic games anyway..

Case in point, I don't think Epic themselves have fully integrated DX12 with UE4 yet, but The Coalition already has integrated DX12 with UE4.

 

[Azix]

Indeed. The cost and effort to develop a 3D engine from scratch that can rival the likes of UE4, CryEngine, Frostbite 3 etcetera would be monumental. Plus, all the previous Gears titles were developed using UE3. Gears 4 being developed on UE4 is just logical, as many former Epic employees now work for The Coalition (which is owned by Microsoft), and Microsoft themselves are a big sponsor of Epic games anyway..

Case in point, I don't think Epic themselves have fully integrated DX12 with UE4 yet, but The Coalition already has integrated DX12 with UE4.

Its software and its not software for the F35, a windows level operating system or some space ship software. Companies with much less money than microsoft are still making game engines.

What epic is able to do is their problem. Unreal Engine conversion to dx12 might well be harder to do than create a dx12 engine from the ground up because its a mass of code already. Not to mention their engine was already behind the curve so why think they have the expertise above other groups?

Engines are also heavily modified by groups. eg. source engine in titanfall. Oxide developed their own engine on a relatively small budget and without a massive company (around 200 people on many projects). They've supported mantle, dx12, dx11 and plan to support vulkan.

that microsoft doesn't seem to have their own engine is kind of an embarrassment. If they thought enough to buy havok, then they should have thought about building an engine to take full advantage of their hardware and windows. Or at least buying one

Gears of War 4 Devs Confident that it’ll Be “Really Really Good” on Windows 10

i really hope this is because they already have it running well.

 

[Alqoxzt]

They could have used Cryengine at least it looks less plastic and proved its worth in RYSE (in terms of visuals of course ).

 

[NTMBK]

Yep, no Steam = very unlikely that I will buy it.

Out of curiosity, how come? What is it about Steam that makes it indispensable? Steam achievements? Social integration? Ease of having all your games in a single catalogue?

 

[Arachnotronic]

Out of curiosity, how come? What is it about Steam that makes it indispensable? Steam achievements? Social integration? Ease of having all your games in a single catalogue?

Ease of having all of my games in a single catalogue, for sure.