As Futuremark has released the new DirectX 12 API Overhead feature test for its 3DMark, AMD has revealed the performance gains for both its GPUs as well as CPUs.

While Futuremark was clear that the new 3DMark API overhead feature test can be used to compare different APIs on the same system, AMD has released some performance figures which shows the performance of different APIs on the Radeon R9 290X graphics card as well as performance scaling on the octa-core FX-8370 CPU.

While it is obvious that AMD's R9 290X benefits from both AMD Mantle API as well as the upcoming DirectX 12, when compared to the DirectX 11, it was quite surprising that there will be a hefty performance gain when it comes to CPU scaling, where DirectX 12 can scale with up to six cores, while DirectX 11 was limited to two cores.

The performance numbers are represented in draw calls, described by Futuremark as process that occurs when the CPU tells the GPU to draw an object on the screen, which usually creates performance-limiting overhead for the CPU.

What is also quite important to note is that higher-performance graphics cards will benefit more from DirectX 12, compared to mid-range and entry-level ones, as, according to results, AMD's R9 290X gets three times more draw calls at 4K resolution compared to the R7 260X.

Bear in mind that these are still just synthetic benchmarks and not a real-world performance, but it is still good to see that DirectX 12 will bring significant performance gains for both GPUs and CPUs, something that will give us better looking games.







Source: AMD.com.