EA's Johan Andersson wants Frostbite games to require Windows 10 and DirectX 12 as a minimum by 2016

[darkrei9n]

[QUOTE=TestECull;47507827]Mm, yes, let's force PC gamers who may not be able to afford it to buy a new video card, a new copy of Windows, then go through all the faff and bother to reinstall Windows solely to play the next Battlefield game. Let's totally not consider that maybe they can't afford to drop that kind of dosh on their rigs! Let's also give two huge middle fingers to collegiate PC gamers on 2-3 year old lappies who due to the spacial restrictions of dorm life can't actually own a desktop and therefore have to spend upwards of four figures on a new laptop that has a DX12 graphics chip on it!

Progress is great and all, but this is just stupid. They're going to lose sales if they actually make it [i]require[/i] W10 and DX12. Recommend? Sure. Build it around that and provide support for W7/DX11/DX9 after the fact? Okay. But forcing everyone to W10/DX12 like this would be a middle finger to PC gamers who through no fault of their own don't have pocketbooks deep enough to upgrade. Hell, the only reason I have a DX12 video card is because of tax return money(And it isn't even a high-end one, just a GTX960), had I not had some spare dosh from that I'd still be on DX11.[/QUOTE]

There is a reason consoles are vastly cheaper than a high end gaming PC.

[rodent-man]

[QUOTE=willtheoct;47489365]I don't.

And this isn't the first time I've tried to find said benefits.

The key benefit they are marketing seems to be that multiple cores can send data to your GPU. This has a huge potential to [U]increase performance in badly programmed games.[/U] Your CPU shouldn't need to send a whole lot of information to your GPU, and your GPU's total processing power should be a bottleneck, if your game is optimized. There are certain exceptions for some unique games, but these games would have to be very unique.

Basically, if your bottleneck was occurring in CPU->GPU transfer, you fucked up bad.

There is also the reduced CPU overhead benefits. [URL="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2014/03/20/directx-12.aspx"]This page here[/URL] explains that CPU time for this case was reduced from 6 ms to 3 ms. This does not mean that you will get double the number of frames. There is no implication whatsoever that it will increase your framerate. The actual result is your GPU receiving data 3 milliseconds earlier, which, with vsync on and on OpenGL4/DX11, can mean your frame would have reached your eyes up to 15 ms later than it should have. With vsync off, it would have only reached your eyes 3 milliseconds later. [U]The framerate you experience will not change.[/U]

Basically, CPU performance doesn't matter.

[sp]My posts on performance and graphics almost always get showered in boxes and no one steps up to the plate to explain why they think I'm wrong. If this is you, explain yourself.[/sp][/QUOTE]

Except the world isn't perfect and unlike GPU's, CPU's don't scale well so we should take as much improvement as we can get if we want to keep pushing the boundaries. Also, when NVidia pushed out their 337.50 update to decrease CPU overhead, [URL="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40826004/stalker.png"]I gained over 50% to my minimum framerate in Stalker.[/URL] That's a pretty big difference. This was on an i5-3570k@4.2 and an Nvidia 680, so my CPU wasn't exactly a blatant bottleneck, yet the improvement showed.

The CPU isn't utilized perfectly at all times either. Much of it may be in bursts, so efficiency gained is that much more important. Here's a screenshot for Killzone 2.
[IMG]http://i43.tinypic.com/2zoy87r.jpg[/IMG]
I don't know enough about DirectX or actual rendering to comment any more, but to my understanding it's still very important when it comes to rendering scenes like games in real-time.

[TheDecryptor]

[QUOTE=ghost901;47497563]Most people already support DX12 and don't even know it.[/QUOTE]

Because people don't realise that DX12 is primarily a new API around their existing hardware.

The talk about Vulkan is interesting for people who don't upgrade (Could probably run Vulkan on XP, if anybody actually cared about doing so), but they're already running older hardware/software, so it's not like they can play up to date games well anyway.

Edit: Nvidia are supporting DX12 on the 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 and 900 series, outside of that your card would be so old (400 series was 2010) that it wouldn't run the game anyway.