Tweaktown was able to have a very enlightening chat with AMD’s Richard Huddy about DX12 and some of their game partnerships that they’ve entered into. Specifically they wanted to know how Asynchronous Shaders would affect the performance of some future games that are on the horizon.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will have full support DirectX 12 along with TressFX 3.0 at launch.
Perhaps this isn’t necessarily unexpected news. The Dawn engine is a very capable technological marvel, and it would make sense for AMD to at least assist in leveraging their expertise in order to use it as a proper showcase, especially considering it’s being touted in their internal press materials as being a perfect fit for their Fiji architecture. We’re also fast approaching nearly 90 Million devices with Windows 10, meaning that DirectX 12 is a valid option for a vast amount of gamers.
What does this mean for NVIDIA, however? Depending on whether or not the software Async scheduler is able to be implemented, and I have no doubt that by the time that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is released that at least a patch in their drivers to enable some sort of software functionality until a true fix can be implemented. But it remains to be seen how that’s going to be dealt with within the engine itself.
Then the question remains, what of consoles? If DirectX 12 will inevitably be an inherent part of the underlying engine, then will consoles thus be able to take advantage of that? So far the implementation within the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are unknown, and we’re not entirely sure how they’ll be able to take advantage of those features, or indeed when. The great thing, however, is that at least the GPU, being GCN based, has Asynchronous Shaders and a not insubstantial performance boost should occur. Will TressFX 3.0 be running on consoles? Probably not, I don’t think they could handle the extra rendering overhead.
Also, Huddy let us know that there will indeed be a benchmark tool included in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, so that we may have a good DirectX 12 benchmark to compare hardware against.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is coming out sometime in 2016 and the original Deus Ex creator has has told us that they’re very excited and happy about the game thus far.
