14 DAY TRIAL // Stardock founder and CEO Brad Wardell has talked about DirectX 12 and believes that the new graphics API from Microsoft will effectively double the power of the console by improving the performance of games and allowing them to better utilize existing hardware.
DirectX 12 was revealed to the world last week by Microsoft at its BUILD conference as the next evolution of the popular graphics API. Unlike current editions of the technology, the new one will be supported across all of Microsoft's devices, from the Windows-based PCs to the Xbox One or the Windows Phone gadgets.
According to Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, who discussed the new technology for NeoWin, DirectX 12 promises to pretty much double the graphics performance of existing hardware.
Wardell is a strong believer, especially since he is involved with Star Swarm technical demo. The demo currently supports DirectX 11 as well as AMD's new Mantle API, which promises increased performance for certain AMD graphics cards.
After this experience, the Stardock boss is confident that DirectX 12 will signal even bigger changes across many devices.
"With relatively little effort by developers, upcoming Xbox One games, PC Games and Windows Phone games will see a doubling in graphics performance. Suddenly, that Xbox One game that struggled at 720p will be able to reach fantastic performance at 1080p. For developers, this is a game changer."
Wardell emphasizes that, once a video card is released, the performance achieved through software like drivers or APIs can see just slight improvements. With DirectX 12, however, a huge leap can be experienced on the PC.
On the Xbox One the benefit is even bigger, with the developer claiming that the tech "effectively gives every Xbox One owner a new GPU that is twice as fast as the old one."
As a game developer, Wardell also noted that DirectX 12 might have a few problems. First up, in terms of hardware, as current graphics cards have their heat management tools tweaked for DirectX 11, which doesn't use the whole card. Once the new tech appears, expect quite a few heating problems to appear in PCs.
The API will also let developers have greater control over the whole process, which means programmers will have to deal with new problems and issues, instead of relying on DirectX to solve them.
Microsoft has promised that it's going to share way more details about DirectX 12 at E3 2014 in June.