Stardock CEO: DX12 and Vulkan can give 4-5x more performance

Posted on Thursday, March 19 2015 @ 12:45 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Niche Gamer did an interview with Brad Wardell, the president and CEO of Stardock. They talked about games, Windows 10 and Stardock's projects but perhaps the most interesting snip are his comments about the performance of new APIs like DirectX 12, Mantle and Vulkan.

Wardell pointed out that these next-gen APIs finally allow all of the cores of your CPU to communicate with your video card simultaneously and that this will deliver a massive performance boost. He claims talk about 20 percent boosts are crap and that you're really looking at four to fivefold performance increases:
So far, what has gotten your attention the most from the show?
For me, it’s the tech, what is going to be the tech story that comes out of here? What I hope most users get, I’ve had a lot of meetings with Microsoft, AMD, and a little bit of Nvidia and Intel – they really need to hit home the fact that DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, allow all of the cores of your CPU to talk to the video card simultaneously. But everyone’s really iffy about that, because that means acknowledging that for the past several years, only one of your cores was talking to the GPU, and no one wants to go ‘You know by the way, you know that multi-core GPU? It was useless for your games.’ Alright? No one wants to be that guy. People wonder, saying ‘Gosh, doesn’t it seem like PC games have stalled? I wonder why that is?’ Well, the speed of a single core on a computer has not changed in years. It’s been at 3GHz, or 2-something GHz for years, I mean that’s not the only thing that affects the speed, but you get the idea. Now, with DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, it’s how many cores you’ve got. We’ve got lots of those. Suddenly, you go by 4x, 5x, the performance.

Why aren’t we hearing more about this? Are hardware manufacturers afraid to show real stats?
That’s another thing, quit with this 20% boost crap. They all know it, and off the record I’ve had people tell me if they say the real numbers, there will be people who just believe it’s marketing fluff. Well, bring them over to your booth, show them, and go ‘Look, here’s DirectX 11, here’s DirectX 12. This is running at 8 frames a second, this is running at 60 frames a second.’ It’s straightforward, but no one wants to admit it. Anandtech did, they showed it, they did their benchmarks.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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