It was back in 2004 – a whopping 14 years ago – when I used to play, what we now call World of Warcraft Classic, like a maniac. Since then countless new expansions have been released of which I’ve only barely touched the first one. Nonetheless it appeared to be about time to Blizzard to give an overhaul to WoW’s underlying engine, which now supports DirectX 12.

Oddly enough – not to say funny enough – it seems frame rates on NVIDIA based graphics cards are taking quite a hit from switching to the new API. On the other hand AMD graphics cards benefit slightly from the addition of DirectX 12.

The guys over at Computerbase actually had a look at the frame rates in combination with a few different cards. In the case of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 @ DX11 their test bench cranked out 70.2 fps at UHD (3840 x 2160) resolution. When switching to DX12 frame rates went down by almost 16 percent. As we already mentioned AMD cards are able to benefit – slightly – while with an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 frame rates went up to 59.4 fps on DX12 from 59.0 fps on DX11 – which in all honesty is not even worth determining the difference in percent.

Next to the addition of the new DirectX 12 API Exclusive Fullscreen has been thrown overboard leaving gamers with only windowed and borderless windowed options. This is actually a good thing since support for 21:9 aspect ratios has been improved.

Overall Blizzard seems to have prepared the game for more updates to come. Supporting DirectX 12 the back-end is now certainly ready for improved graphics.



Source: ComputerBase - Techpowerup