<story><title>DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 oversimplified</title><url>http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/460524/DirectX11vsDirectX12_oversimplified</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>It really is oversimplified.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Creating dozens of light sources simultaneously on screen at once is basically not doable unless you have Mantle or DirectX 12.  Guess how many light sources most engines support right now? 20? 10? Try 4. Four. Which is fine for a relatively static scene. &amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;For my Masters degree project at uni I had a demo written in OpenGL with over 500 dynamic lights, running at 60fps on a GTX580. Without Mantle, or DX12. How? Deffered rendering, that&amp;#x27;s how. You could probably add a couple thousand and it would be fine too.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Every time I hear someone say “but X allows you to get close to the hardware” I want to shake them.  None of this has to do with getting close to the hardware. It’s all about the cores&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Also not true. I work with console devkits every single day and the reason why we can squeeze so much performance out of relatively low-end hardware is that we get to make calls which you can&amp;#x27;t make on PC. A DirectX call to switch a texture takes a few thousand clock cycles. A low-level hardware call available on Playstation Platform will do the same texture switch in few dozen instruction calls. The numbers are against DirectX, and that&amp;#x27;s why Microsoft is slowly letting devs access the GPU on the Xbox One without the DirectX overhead.</text></comment>
<story><title>DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 oversimplified</title><url>http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/460524/DirectX11vsDirectX12_oversimplified</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jra101</author><text>&amp;quot;Last Fall, Nvidia released the Geforce GTX 970.  It has 5.2 BILLION transistors on it. It already supports DirectX 12. Right now.  It has thousands of cores in it.  And with DirectX 11, I can talk to exactly 1 of them at a time.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not how it works, the app developer has no control over individual GPU cores (even in DX12). At the API level you can say &amp;quot;draw this triangle&amp;quot; and the GPU itself splits the work across multiple GPU cores.</text></comment>