I don't own this game yet as i've still not finished the first one, but i'm super interested in how DX12 will be used in games in the future. From what i've read online so far it seems to have actually lowered the performance in this game a little bit for most people, but has anybody here given it a shot? I've also read people with older GPUs might be getting slightly better performance (could be trolls though you never know)

I own a Radeon R9 390 which is basically like a GeForce 970 in many ways, on par performance wise. Rise of the Tomb Raider ran surprisingly subpar for me in open areas - there is this one particular hub location you get to that ran sub 30 FPS while on High Settings. The DX12 support was supposed to help offload some of those computations onto the individual CPU cores, or so I gather from a rather lengthy and very technical blog posted by Nixxes on their dev blog HERE.

I run an AMD FX-8150 8 core processor so that should theoretically help me out quite a bit as not only is Rise.. optimized in favor of Nvidia hardware (as is the case for most games) but it's also rather demanding and the R9 390 while a very good card isn't top of the line material anymore. Did I notice a huge difference? Not really. It appeared to run a bit smoother in that one hub area which is the biggest offender in terms of performance out of the entire game (I beat it) but it wasn't some crazy jump from 30 FPS to a smooth 60 or even 50. Felt more like the sub 30's turned into steady 30's with occasional spikes into mid 40's when you weren't facing the vast expanse of the land.

As far as I know AMD cards stand to gain the most from DX12, supposedly helping them close the gap with Nvidia through better software pipelining. The game certainly didn't work worse for me, but it wasn't the significant performance boost I was hoping for. Possibly with some more time and more developers beginning to make the most out of DX12 we will see the gap start to close up and in some cases like the 970 vs. the theoretically more powerful R9 390, see AMD finally take the lead. It's not there yet.

I ran the benchmark at identical graphical settings (1080p, 120hz, everything maxed out apart from AA, which was SMAA).

DX11:

DX12:

Within the margin of error as to be identical, I think, but it's worth noting that one of the DX12 runs hard locked my system.

W10 x64, 4670k @4.2ghz, 16gb RAM, 980ti, SSD

@dave_tacitus: seems like it lowered your mininum frames more than anything, which i would have hoped it would have raised.

@humanity: I had a longer post written but it somehow disappeared. I think your CPU is holding you back more than your GPU, and i bet that's why you saw a little bit of an upgrade in performance. I find it odd that Rise is geared towards Nvidia when the last game was the opposite with the whole tressfx thing. I had an 8350 until just a few months ago and even when i upgraded to a 980 from a 7950 some games would just tank in FPS, and i was hoping DX12 would help with that which it looks like it does even if just a little so far.

@oursin_360: I had a framerate counter running alongside the benchmark - I hate benchmarks which don't include one - and didn't notice those DX12 min frames at all so suspect it must be a small stutter at the beginning of each scene.

The only other experience I've had with DX12 so far has been with Hitman, and that's been pretty awful while I've seen reports of people with 7950s (a card I also owned, fantastic bang for the buck at the time) having better in-game performance than me. Hitman's a Gaming Evolved title, though, but the early rumours of Team Red having the initial lead in DX12 performance seem to be true.

@oursin_360: Yah it's not the newest CPU but it's still pretty decent for today and I was hoping the 8 core design would make it the perfect candidate to benefit from DX12. Witcher 3 for instance ran pretty damn well on high settings back when I still used a Radeon 7870.

EDIT: Actually I think I might be running an 8300?? I'm not home I'll have to check later.

Damn you Windows 10, you had one job!

Getting more and more disillusioned with Microsoft these days...

@sinusoidal: Windows 10 is pretty good. No complaints here. Don't fall into the internet trap of being angry at a company, it's seriously not worth it.

@humanity: Yep, I don't have many complaints about W10 in general. Heck, my usb Saturn pad is now working again - something that W8 completely buggered up - and a lot of older ddraw games I've tried work better now too.

OK, I'm not mad at Microsoft then. I'm mad at my computer's performance getting worse with every 'update'. It used to wake up instantly. Now it takes tens of seconds. TENS OF SECONDS! And what was the deal with that "All your files are where you left them" stuff? That was some grade-A big brother creepiness.

I run a few benchmarks and played a little. As far as i can see there is no difference whatsoever.

@dave_tacitus:Yeah, 7950 was an amazing card for what i paid for it and how long it lasted. It wasn't running max 60fps, but it could run max 45-50fps most times lol. I still have it and I think i'm going to make another pc for work and maybe some light gaming, with my old 8350 and 7950, and maybe dx12 could extend the life even further.

@humanity:Yeah it's decent, but in terms of gaming it just fails to match the top intel chips. I know it's cheaper, but AMD doesn't really offer anything better than an 8350(the only new chip right now is a massively overclocked 8350 that won't even stay cool on standard water coolers). I was getting stutters and constant drops to 30fps in games like The secret world, Vermintide, Fallout 4, etc(basically anything that did a good amount of calls to the cpu. While I could max out games like MGSV(980), Witcher 3(Maxed out with a 980 60-50fps, high settings without hair works with a 7950 45-50fps), and Mad Max(980). I was going to wait it out until dx12 dropped but I kinda got fed up with a 980 under performing in so many games. I think my next upgrade might be an AMD card with an intel chip, as Gameworks/phsyx never works and I can't stand the driver issues. Biggest leap i've had so far in an upgrade wasn't the grafx card but the cpu and possibly ram(ddr4) which really helped with the stutters and constant fps drops i got.

@oursin_360: That's basically what I did with my old PC. It's running an older CPU than yours (a Phenom II BE) but still has a 780, 8GB of RAM and an SSD. Right now it's a hugely overpowered HTPC but I'm using it so little now that I've got Plex installed on my TV that I'm thinking of turning it into a hugely overpowered NAS.

@oursin_360: I haven't really had any issues with games for a long time when running high settings and tinkering with shadows and stuff like that. I've been surprised at how smooth of a gaming experience I've been having with aging components. But yah AMD is definitely worse for both CPU's and Video Cards, but my brother works at a company that gets discounts on their products so I constantly keep ending up with either Radeons or AMD chipsets despite wanting to jump ship to Nvidia/Intel.

@humanity:

In theory, yeah. But game-makers are still gonna have to optimize their DX12 games to be able to multi-thread that much (8 cores), which are rare enough that it won't likely be happening all that much for quite a while if ever, especially given that almost all performance-intensive games are ports going to consoles as well, which have 4 cores.

I don't know what the deal is but I get insanely slow asset loading and pop in while using DX 12. Like the final area of the of the benchmark in Syria literally cannot finish loading before it finishes it's sweep through of the area and the first 4-7 seconds is completely devoid of actual ground terrain. I get none of those issues with DX11.

@neocalypso: When I mentioned the DX12 benchmark crashing on me earlier it was while loading in the Syria level. It froze my machine completely - had to manually reset the PC, something I've not done in a long time.