"World of Warcraft" is really a world! It can be said that "World of Warcraft" is the peak of the MMORPG class.
Since its development in 2004, it has undergone 7 major revisions. From Azeroth to Argus, Blizzard has been creating an epic story for players, and has been leading the replacement of computer hardware. From technology to gameplay, it is constantly updated. After all, it is a super-large online game that has been carefully crafted for more than ten years.
Recently, "World of Warcraft" has carried out a large-scale underlying upgrade. Compared with other technical upgrades, players are more concerned about how much the upgrade of the number of game frames is compared to the previous DX12 API technology compared with the previous DX 11.
Many players played the demo in the first place, but most people said that after updating DX12, the increase in the number of game frames is not large.
In order to let everyone have a deeper understanding of the performance of the DX12 updated by World of Warcraft, today we have a hard wave from a professional perspective.
What exactly is DirectX 12?
DirectX 12 is a new generation of API technology officially released by Microsoft on GDC in 2014.
The technology uses the latest high-performance graphics API, closer to the underlying hardware technology, can run on various hardware platforms supported by micro-end, and is supported by a variety of excellent development tools, which can provide support for major hardware vendors.
Compared with previous generations, the biggest change of DX 12 lies in the underlying API. The new API can perform parallel task generation and management on multi-core CPUs. The biggest role is to fully liberate the potential of processors and graphics cards.
In addition, DX 12 will greatly improve the efficiency of multi-threaded rendering, especially for some games with more demand for multi-threading, DirectX 12's use of multi-core CPU is almost perfectly linear growth, can fully play multi-threaded The potential of hardware. The previous generation DX 11 was more limited in this respect.
DirectX 12 is not only a great technology for hardware manufacturers, but also has many benefits for gamers. For example, higher FPS can make games smoother, and better energy efficiency makes PC system more power efficient. More quiet.
Performance measurement
Our performance test on World of Warcraft is very serious. To test how much the latest DX12 technology helps us experience the game, the easiest way is to use the same game under DX 11 and DX 12 technologies. The scene is tested to record changes in the number of game frames.
In order to make our test results closer to most gamers, We specially selected the GTX 1080Ti, which has the strongest performance of the graphics card, and the GTX 1060 6GB and RX 580, which are popular among most gamers, for performance comparison test.
In the actual test session, we set the game screen to 2560x1440, special effects 10, 4XMSAA-CMAA, trilinear filtering, multi-sampling test and reduced input delay on.
Select the three test sites below the Dalaransus platform, the Surama civilian area and the Surama aristocratic Twilight winery.
GTX 1080Ti test
After switching from DX11 to DX12 in World of Warcraft, GTX 1080Ti has a significant loss in performance, and it is impossible to maintain the original number of game frames.
However, the performance of the GTX 1080Ti is put there, even if the performance is lost, the basic frame number of 60 frames or more can still be maintained. On the next page we will attach a detailed scene picture comparison.
Next we will focus on two graphics cards of comparable performance, one for the NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB public version, one for the ASUS AMD RX 580 STRIX, for the DX 12 features deployed in the game engine on the N and A cards The performance on the top makes a detailed comparison.
GTX 1060 6GB public version test
GTX 1060 6GB public version of the test is the same as the previous GTX 1080Ti test environment. Under the same settings, the performance of the graphics card dropped significantly from DX 11 to DX 12 in the three game scenes, and some scenes dropped by 14%.
Although AMD, Intel, NVIDIA's DX 12 implementation and technical support are not the same, but the performance loss after switching DX 12 is so serious is still rare.
In the N-card test session, we found that during the World of Warcraft experience, after switching from DX 11 to DX 12, the CPU occupancy rate decreased, and the processor frequency increased significantly.
ASUS RX 580 STRIX test
From the test data, the ASUS RX 580 STRIX switched to DX 12 in these three game scenarios, the number of game frames has been significantly improved, although the increase is not large, but compared to the performance of the N card performance degradation, A card in The World of Warcraft Azeroth has a small performance improvement of 1%-3%.
In terms of processor occupancy, after using A card to switch to DX 12 in World of Warcraft, the CPU usage dropped significantly, and the processor frequency began to decline. In the A card, the DX 12 technology was reflected, the graphics card and CPU overload. Get relieved.
Test summary
First of all, the performance of the A card is improved after the DX 12 is turned on during the game, and the N card is as good as the netizen after opening the DX 12, and the performance has not improved, even decreased.
This may be related to the DX 12 features deployed in the game. In the official Blizzard forum, it is also mentioned that the NVIDIA graphics card defaults to DX 11. Not all NVIDIA graphics cards support DX 12. As for the performance degradation, no one gives the answer.
Secondly, as the biggest highlight after the upgrade of World of Warcraft, whether it is A card or N card, the CPU usage of DX 11 is higher than DX 12.
However, because the performance of the A card itself on DirectX 12 has little effect on the processor, in contrast, the N card occupies four CPU cores in DirectX 11, and only two half cores in DirectX 12, visible. The load balance is degraded, and the impact is relatively large, so the performance of the graphics card will decrease.
Finally, whether in DX 11 or DX 12, the GTX 1060 6GB public version is superior to the ASUS RX 580 STRIX in terms of the number of game frames.
If in the future version, NVIDIA's graphics card can be optimized for World of Warcraft DX 12, then more players will experience better DirectX technology and make the game experience better.
