As you may already know, we are kind of disappointed with the current state of DX12. This new low-level API has not managed – at least yet – to offer better performance than its DX11 counterpart, something that really puzzled us. However, things may change as Microsoft has introduced a new performance and debugging tool for developers that analyzes the performance of DX12 games.
This tool is called PIX and is available right now to all game developers. According to its description, PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for game developers, and its latest beta version lets developers analyze the performance of DirectX 12 games.
Thanks to its main modes, PIX can debug and analyze the performance of Direct3D 12 graphics rendering, offer captures to the developers for undestanding the performance and threading of all CPU and GPU work carried out by their game, and provide insight into the memory allocations made by their game.
The good news is that PIX supports both UWP and Win32 applications (however it is limited to 64-bit apps only).
Ultimately, this could lead to better DX12 games as developers will – hopefully – be able to properly optimize their games thanks to PIX.
Game developers can download PIX from here.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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PC needs power of cloud instead of this like xbox, xbox one is going to outperform any high end PC by far, why not bring that feature to PC?
You’re dumb
He’s a troll. Just block him then you never need to see his comments again.
Damn i blocked him before i rub in his face that his precious ps4 has not managed to put out any games that have the same visual quality as the order 1886 and thus ps4 did not become more optimized, LIKE WE SAID YEARS AGO, but that was just a cinematic scripted linear qte fest.
I’m an idiot because I find VR to be a sad, pathetic fad forwarded by sad pathetic sycophants like you?
Okay, good luck with that.
P.S. Hey Mr. Genius, Disqus doesn’t block the word “idiot” – like so; idiot.
why?
Bad on your replies, You’re either trolling or incompetent. Choose your responses carefully.
i’m not sure why people get upset, i’m not harming you, i’m just stating my opinion like others do
Relying on the cloud for additional performance isn’t something PC gamers want to rely on. Although in specific titles we saw some amazing gains from it, we’d rather it run locally on our PC’s. Things like DRM, Always Online, among others are typically frowned upon.
well these days every game has denuvo and other sort of online check protection so you might as well go ahead and add another one to the list
The minority of games has denuvo and online check protection. Like, a very little minority.
Cloud is useful for weak hardware, like the one featured in consoles. Any decent PC has more than enough horsepower to run games locally. Cloud has a few cons, latency, and always online to mention some.
9 out of 10 triple a games have denuvo, certainly not very little minority as you mentioned, consoles and high end PCs are not that far apart performance wise, there’s a gap but not what PC elitists want it to be, latency won’t be a problem if you have a good internet connection also always online games shouldn’t be a problem at this point, it’s 2017
“9 out of 10 triple a games have denuvo”
Nope!
Try again.
“also always online games shouldn’t be a problem at this point, it’s 2017”
Yeah? Tell that the majority of the world’s population that resides OUTSIDE of either Coastal North America &/or most of North-Western Europe, or just the big cities, period.
“How things should be” by this point & “how things actually are” by this point are two completely separate things, kiddo, wake up to this fact already.
Besides, it’s not just about spotty service, or ripoff ISP’s that are constantly trying to f*ck over their customers, or even something as simple as a storm causing problems with phone lines or some sh*t like that, it’s also about how in a few years, those online servers are going to get shut down, & we’re going to lose access to the product we legally paid for because Square C*nts wants us to buy the sequel – yeah, no. F*ck that sh*t.
even though you’re right my love for phil spencer and xbox has no limits, it runs so deep that i was going to be a moderator on PCgamer
Damn, I’ve just got to upvote this post. I mean, PC Gamer has gone to such deep levels of sh*t, that this comment is just pure comedy.
” high end PCs are not that far apart performance wise”
Lol what?
your pc is easily beaten by a ps4 pro hardware and i’m willing to bet my life on it, that’s what
LOL NO i have a 4790K and a 1080 LOL even a RX 480 is more powerful
PS4 Pro has a tablet CPU at best as well. How funny and cute your comment really is.
Cherry pick all the triple A games that you want, not even close 9 out 10 will have denuvo. Also, you said ‘every game’. Again, games with denuvo are a tiny minority; that’s a fact.
The gap between high end PCs and consoles is indeed big. In one year, it’ll be bigger. In two, well, even you can get to the point.
they are majority, you like 2d garbage like undertale?that’s fine, but most actually fun triple a video games are using denuvo, denuvo is majority not minority, majority (near all) of new triple a titles are using denuvo, that’s a fact, you just have to accept it and move on, nothing to pirate
Still waiting for that 9 out 10 denuvo protected triple A list…
Kid, you have a very narrow perspective you know. Do I enjoy 2D indie games? Yes, Salt&Sanctuary was a blast. Do I enjoy their AAA counterparts? Of course, as soon as I finish DI Riptide Remastered I’m heading into the DLC of Dark Souls III. Ahhh, the joy of being a PC gamer! The never-ending backlog!
P.S.: Just to inform you, denuvo protection gets cracked also.
“these days every game has denuvo and other sort of online check protection”
Nope!
Try again.
You know, when people state opinions, it’s usually in an understandable way, and some people may empathize with some opinions.
However, when you make outlandishly stupid statements and then dress them up as “opinions”, you are either:
A. trolling
or
B. really really stupid.
But when someone can’t tell if that person is either trolling or stupid, then that person really needs to stop and reevaluate his life. Just saying, buddy. :3
“This new low-level API has not managed – at least yet – to offer better performance than its DX11 counterpart, something that really puzzled us”
I guess we’re ignoring the gains AMD gets in DX12?
Yes, but that’s relative to how poor AMD cards generally run with DX11.
And the lack of the hardware that gives AMD its benefits in NVIDIA cards. Even then, not all titles offer those benefits. For instance for Async Compute, in games like Deus Ex – Mankind divided, Async is only used for rendering hair IIRC.
It seems that generally speaking DX12 is so far most beneficial to those whose PC features as decent GPU paired with a weak CPU.
Short sighted, but yes. However that free’s up CPU cycles to be able to perform more complex tasks (IE more features in games). Why send the entire renderer through the CPU, which Nvidia has to do as they use a software scheduler, when you can send it directly to the GPU? More efficient, which PC has desperately needed. Nvidia will eventually adopt the hardware dependency once low level API’s are adopted more.
That would imply differences on DX 11 as huge. They are not. Without taking into consideration Gameworks titles (that are usually broken), there are games where AMD and Nvidia perform similarly… and when DX 12 is enabled, AMD improves. And that’s not only on DX 12 but in Vulkan as well. But let’s say AMD sucks on both DX 11 and OpenGL. The fact that they are seeing performance improvements compared to inconsistent showings on Nvidia (the 10xx series shows some improvements while others even get worse performance) proves that it’s not really the APIs fault if one vendor can’t get benefits from it.
PIX has been around for years.
New PIX specific for DX12.
Yep. All the various little bits & pieces that are usually associated with a major new DirectX release are trickling in slowly, bit-by-bit because Microsoft was forced to release Windows 10 years ahead of schedule.
Take the new shader language, for example, which is due early this year, almost 2 years post-DirectX 12’s actual release.
Really highlights how ridiculously unprepared & unfinished they were/it was at launch.
Best time to give up our unhealthy habit of playing violent videogames, people.
All those corporations are helping us in this endeavour now more than ever; be it Macrohard with its shady spying practices (“updates”) and shoving winten down consumers throats or infamous HW manufacturers like Outtel or nWEEdia with their ever-increasing prices of baked sand – to outrageous levels, especially outside US.
And don’t even get me started on the current state of the videogames “industry”.
My experience has shown great gains with AMD processors and GPUs, with losses on Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. It’s not a scam, it’s just most people aren’t on the hardware that utilizes it the best.
I nearly doubled my frame rates on Rise of the Tomb Raider, and saw big jumps on Doom and Hitman with my AMD 8320.
How is this different from RenderDoc which has become basically the industry standard?
RenderDoc is just for graphics, no? PIX debugs memory, gpu and timings.
RenderDoc works for graphics API’s yes. But I think that RenderDoc also debugs memory, gpu, timings, etc. because a graphics API can access all those things.
It’s got a different name, & it’s “made” by Microsoft.
In other words; they changed about a dozen lines of code, in order to avoid a copyright lawsuit, gave it a dumb name, & called it “a Microsoft original.”
Do you have a source for that?
No, it’s just a joke. It’s like how DirectX 12 is only called DirectX 12 because AMD made Mantle, thus giving Microsoft the idea to copy/paste Mantle into DirectX 11.3 so they could come out with “DirectX 12” in Windows 10.
Not to mention everything else Microsoft only did after its competitors, usually in a much worse form.
(Footnote: DirectX 11.3 actually exists, though – check it out)
My bad, I forgot the “;D” at the end. Edited, cheers.
This happen just one week after Valve released their tools for debugging Linux games on RadeonSI and after Vulkan tools. LOL what a coincidence.
Microsoft: Ripping Off the Competition Since 1981.
HEY MS, STAHP, JUST STAHP….. LET SOMEONE ELSE DO IT, STHAP WHAT YOU DOING, STAHP IT.
It’s Windows Vista and DX10 all over again.
Hoping developers will embrace Vulkan instead.
Hey MS how about applying this to titles YOU MAKE, to prove any of the idiotic gains or claims you usually make through sold out media (like the “game mode” bs). Try Forza Horizons 3 which this site found was single core optimized in their testing. You make horrible PC ports that are either hindered by UWP, incompetence or strategy (60 FPS Forza Horizons 3 would make Xbox One’s 30 look bad) and then point the finger at other devs?
You are worthless for gaming, no one wants your console, no one wants to use DX 12/UWP and Vulkan API is better for all vendors, so what are you doing? Buying more middleware. You are not needed so you will make yourself needed the MS way. Acquisitions and more walls.
Why would I ever want to use your garbage API when I can’t even use reshade/sweetfx with it and the dev of that program refuses to support your stupid API but will support Vulkan. In game SMAA in Rise of the Tomb Raider sucks. SMAA in reshade that works in DX 11 is incredible. Oh and you still wouldn’t let it through UWP if he did support it, so him spending time supporting DX 12 would be pointless. Durante who made DSFIX/Gedosato also thinks UWP is a joke. DX 12 is a @#%#ing prison on planet bull#%#%. In the galaxy of this sucks camel d#%$. No one wants PC to be a console.All we wanted from you was decent ports on your own Origin. You couldn’t even give us Ubisoft levels of incompetence. You made them look good.
more vulkan support please so can get rid windows and use wine
DX13 will fix this!!! (trollface)
Oh, just f*ck off already Microsoft!