This is Destroying Our FPS

no amount of Twitter apologies is ever gonna make up for it you know it I know it we all knew it recent games have been running like garbage some are so simply graphically demanding that it hurts our souls some like to take all of your vram and throw it into the void never to be seen again some like to take your CPU use and abuse it for insane bottlenecks then some games like to do all of these things at the exact same time but this whole game optimization horse has been beaten to death I want to point out something that all of these games have in common that is that they are made in direct X 12. yes that's what that little number letter thing means in benchmarks is the very thing these games are built on the same thing that is destroying their performance well I'm going to show you something real quick that might convince you on this point some games allow you to change the API that they're running it if you've ever seen it in fortnite or in The Witcher 3 for this example we've gotten DirectX 11 the predecessor to DirectX 12 on the right and the rendering of the game is virtually identical try to Spot the Difference what you might notice is the difference in fps it's like twice as fast on DirectX 11. it's no competition whatsoever you know it's an awesome feature of the DirectX 12 version of Witcher 3 is that you can use dlss to make up that performance Gap right or even with dlss quality it's still not even close also in fortnite we see performance hits across the board going to dx12 on a pretty large variety of graphics cards most of which are up to only three years old you would think that we're getting better performance with DirectX 12 but we aren't have you noticed that some of the best looking and Performing games still use DirectX 11 or even older apis to this day first I gotta get this straight I am not Mr game developer man with years and years of experience I don't exactly know what it's like to work with DirectX 11 versus DirectX 12 but Wikipedia is a pretty cool website second in order to understand this we need to understand what an API is or more specifically a graphics API in our case now I'm going to be simplifying this quite a bit because apis are very complicated and it's kind of beyond the scope of this video if I'm being honest basically a messenger that allows software on your PC say a game for example to communicate with PC Hardware say your graphics card and the most popular Graphics API at the moment on PC especially is DirectX and that's made by Microsoft then the second most popular is Vulcan which you might have heard to be you know the savior of all apis and that is by the Kronos group we're going to talk a little bit more about that one later the third thing why the heck are we using DirectX 12 if DirectX 11 was better well it technically isn't and we find ourselves here on the Wikipedia article the entire idea of DirectX 12 is to actually optimize the experience to use more of your CPU and have less driver overhead and what's interesting is in earlier games with implementations they actually showed a performance gain when running in dx12 say control in 2019 or shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018 there's probably tons more examples but these are some ones I could get my hands on these seem to be way different than games that are releasing with DirectX 12 now and that might be because that is not the same version of DirectX 12 that we're on now today we're on dx12 ultimates yes the Ultimate Edition this was revealed in 2020 and it came with a lot of interesting features one especially to note is Ray tracing built right into DirectX the bane of our FPS it seems like the problem that DirectX 12 is having nowadays is the same thing that makes it so good and it's just insane amount of control that developers have when using it that's probably why we see now in games using more of our CPU than ever before but somehow they still end up being unoptimized and the fact that we want more and more dx12 features like nanite Lumen Ray tracing high-res textures all of that to improve graphical Fidelity we want games to keep looking better and better but these Technologies are extremely demanding and you can fight me on this Remnant 2 with nanite but not Lumen is still a very gorgeous game graphically games are improving pretty dramatically and that means devs are having to learn faster than ever of how to utilize all of this stuff in dx12 that includes the developers that make the game engines like Unreal Engine 5. that I know a lot of people love to hate on what's funny and I mentioned it before when dx12 first started coming around that devs were generally speaking just porting games from dx11 to dx12 just to make it run in the new API you know even though we did get more FPS and that kind of stuff we did some see some of the issues that we are having today consistently with new games cropping up back when dx12 was first being used in control for example it used significantly more video memory in dx12 compared to dx11 but graphically the games looked pretty much exactly the same even when it comes down to the textures what's really interesting is DirectX 12 is actually pretty old now and the ultimate version that we're currently on three years old at this point we're still getting games that are struggling to handle it and even some new game games are releasing without the very demanding features of DirectX 12 say atomic heart not releasing with Ray tracing say Remnant 2 without the Lumen lighten system from Unreal Engine 5. maybe say for example The Last of Us Part one that didn't launch with Ray tracing even though it probably could have had it the kind of compound with the new experience of working with DirectX 12 many devs still aren't using some of the features that are baked into it that could help with performance dramatically say one like a vrs variable rate shading pretty much improves the performance in games for free barely any graphical hit whatsoever many devs still don't choose to use it nowadays and instead many developers are using dlss or other upscalers to make up the Gap kind of as a crutch notice in games like cyberpunk it defaults to putting an upscaler on whatever graphic quality preset in The Last of Us Part One it needs upscaling on most graphics cards to keep the vram requirements down and this is what brings me to the Vulcan enjoyers I know that are watching this video right now y'all are an army teaming up to take down DirectX if DirectX 12 is so challenging why don't we just use Vulcan it's competitor I mean do maternal is an awesome looking game it runs super great and it's also built on Vulcan there must be you know a correlation there right Vulcan as a graphics API offers very similar features to DirectX like Ray tracing and developers being able to control the very low level Computing to make games more efficient and run smoother and as well Vulcan isn't made by Microsoft what that really means is that Vulcan isn't restricted to Windows or Xbox makes developers that want to Port their games to other systems have a way easier time because they don't have to translate to different Graphics apis but contrary to what probably most of us think about Vulcan it actually runs into basically all the same issues the DirectX does you know it still has that low level of computing for developers so that means it's also very complex and there's a lot of development struggles and optimizations just like DirectX 12. and then compounded Vulcan isn't as popular as DirectX that means there isn't as large of a community that can offer support to Vulcan like the same group that huddles around DirectX also using do maternal as a benchmark for this to say that it runs better than DirectX or something like that seems like it's kind of an exception because in another game that is able to switch between Vulcan and DirectX 12 was red Dead Redemption 2 and in this game both apis performed about the same generally speaking I actually found dx12 was a little bit faster so to me there isn't a huge reason to use Vulcan over DirectX except for it being easier to port to different systems but I might be mistaken on that so let me know in the comments if you have a little bit more developer Insight again game optimization has been doo doo lately and it hurts to see when we've seen games that are from the past that even ran in DirectX 11 the older API that still hold up very well visually today like control and it runs extremely well we just want to see optimizations like that in our games but what do you think is dx12 too challenging for devs to work with to to control all of the low level Computing is it possibly this awkward growing stage as we're transform forming into a different era of how to render games like with Ray tracing and stuff like that is that holding us back or do you just say ah screw it dx11 games look better than dx12 games who cares let's just throw it out nobody needs it in the end I'm just kind of out here trying to figure out why games are running so poorly nowadays one reason is obviously that devs are making games for new consoles as well which makes them more demanding but that's only one part of the story there has to be more to this it just doesn't really make sense with how consistent this stuff is right now that's all I've got for you I hope you guys have a great rest of your day and I'll see in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: Vex

Views: 392,616

Keywords: fps, performance, game performance, game fps, frames, killing our fps, killing our games, destroying our fps, killing your gains, dx 12, dx12, dx11, dx 11, directx, directx 12, directx 11, vulkan, dx12 vs vulkan, destroying fps, destroying game performance, destroying game fps, vex, api, apis, graphics api

Id: mtsxlKPMthI

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023