2014 is quickly becoming the year of the low-level gaming APIs. Performance is able to be boosted in ways you could convince yourself you were experiencing new, more powerful hardware through getting closer to the “metal” of the GPU when developing the latest titles.
The first to make the headlines in recent years was AMD’s ‘Mantle‘ which allows for deep-access to the company’s range of GPUs. Games were patched with support for its APIs including DICE’s Battlefield 4 which, in testing, on average offered a fairly mediocre 10% boost over DirectX 11. At a 1680×1050 resolution, however, more significant gains were seen – Mantle offered 18% more frames when tested on a FX-8350, Core i3-4130 and Core i7-4770, while the A8-7600 was 24% faster.
Mantle appeared more of a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution and appeared designed to kick-off this vital low-level gaming API revolution by showing its benefits. Months after, Microsoft announced its widely-used and highly-anticipated DirectX 12 which was developed alongside AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm. Working alongside these partners allows for lower-level access for developers and the performance benefits across a variety of hardware.
DirectX 12 features improved CPU utilisation with the workload able to be spread across multiple cores – effectively halving the load of DirectX 11.
Matt Sandy, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Direct3D team, said: “What makes Direct3D 12 better? First and foremost, it provides a lower level of hardware abstraction than ever before, allowing games to significantly improve multithread scaling and CPU utilization. In addition, games will benefit from reduced GPU overhead via features such as descriptor tables and concise pipeline state objects.
He continued: “Direct3D 12 also introduces a set of new rendering pipeline features that will dramatically improve the efficiency of algorithms such as order-independent transparency, collision detection, and geometry culling.”
One of the biggest expected benefactors is Microsoft’s Xbox One console – but with DirectX 12’s release late this year we won’t see any results come to fruition until 2015. The console may have competition from an unexpected contender, however, if Apple’s WWDC presentation is anything to go by…
Last year, Apple introduced a 64-bit processor to their iDevices which was the first in consumer devices. It brought with it huge performance improvements once games and applications were updated to support the new architecture. With iOS 8, unveiled at WWDC this week, Apple has its own new low-level gaming API solution aptly-called ‘Metal’.
Metal was demonstrated running Popcap’s current Xbox One-exclusive title, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare. The developers of Zen Garden were also on-hand to show thousands of objects such as flower petals all floating around at once. It was an impressive display, and is an early vision at what a future Apple TV could do for the console space alongside the newly-supported gaming controllers.
What do you think about the new low-level gaming APIs? Let us know in the comments.
