You may have heard that in Fortnite, you can use DX12. But, what is the difference of Fortnite performance between using DX11 vs using DX12? Also, what are the advantages of using DX12 and how to set it to DX12? We will inform you about it here.
Comparison Performance of Fortnite DX11 vs DX12
On Youtube, there are some Youtubers who try to compare the Fortnite performance when they use DX12 and DX12. And they say that there are not many differences. The videos that you are able to watch about this comparison are listed below.
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- A video of Alpha Benchmarks entitled Fortnite Dx11 vs Dx12 (Performance Comparison) which was uploaded on February 9th, 2020. The duration of the video is 10 minutes and 4 seconds and it has been watched more than 74k times. In the video, he tested just that on the GTX 1650 Super paired with an Ryzen 5 3600 at 1080p. He also used shadowplay. In the video, you can see that there is not much difference in using DX12 over DX11.
- A video of TechEpiphany entitled Fortnite DirectX 11 vs Direct 12 Comparison NVIDIA which was uploaded on November 20th, 2019. The duration of the video is 3 minutes and 45 seconds. It has been watched more than 138k times. In the video, he uses Ryzen 5 3600, Asrock B450M Pro4, Wrath Prism at full speed, Palit Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Gaming Pro OC, Driver 441.34 WHQL.
You can see the details of DX11 and DX12 by watching these videos. And you can compare by yourself, which one is better or you may also think that using DX11 and DX12 has not much difference.
Announcement of Microsoft DirectX12 Coming to Fortnite
The announcement about Microsoft DirectX 12 coming to Fortnite was announced by the Fortnite team on November 18th, 2019. At that time, they announced on the Epic Games site that the PC version of Fortnite needed a graphics card which could run Microsoft DirectX 11. In v11.20, you have the added option to play the PC version using Microsoft DirectX 12.
On that announcement, they said that if you use DX12, your PC with high-end GPU may be able to have a higher and steadier frame rate. Why can it happen? It is because DX12 sends better CPU performance and permits for the distribution of rendering jobs across multiple cores.
Furthermore, in the announcement, they also planned to add features to Fortnite which are made possible by DX12. It will permit players to choose into DX12 before these features are added. And it will give the team of Fortnite valuable information in their development efforts and also help them shake out any bugs.
When we checked on the announcement on December 14th, 2020, there is an update on that post that to address the stability, the DirectX 12 beta has been disabled for Windows 10 version 1607 and older.
What is DirectX?
DirectX is an API which permits you to be able to run video games on your PC. DX is a Microsoft proprietary platform which it only can support Windows. DirectX acts as an intermediate between the game engine and the graphics drivers. In turns, it will interact with the OS Kernel. A graphics API is a platform where the game is designed and mechanics are figured out. The output program of a graphics API is readable only by the API which is used to design it. So in general, an API is designed for a specific OS so that’s why PS4 games do not run on the Xbox One and vice versa. DirectX 12 Ultimate is the first graphics API which breaks the rule. It will be used on Windows and also next-gen Xbox Series X.
Advantages of DirectX 12 API for PC Gamers
According to Hardware Times, there are three primary advantages of the DirectX 12 API for PC gamers. The first one is better scaling with multi-core CPUs. With DirectX 9 and 11 based games, most games only used 2 to 4 cores for the various mechanics including AI, Physics, draw-calls and more. Even some games were limited to one. But, with DirectX12 it has changed. The load is more evenly distributed across all cores and it makes multi-core CPUs more relevant for gamers.
Another advantage of DirectX12 is maximum hardware utilization. Traditionally, NVIDIA has had much better driver support whole AMD hardware has always suffered from the lack. So, DirectX 12 adds a lot of technologies to be able to improve utilization such as asynchronous compute which permits multiple stages of the pipeline to be executed simultaneously. In addition, the advantage of DirectX12 is that developers have more control over how their games use the hardware.
How is Fortnite Performance If We Switch to DX12?
According to the Microsoft site, DX12 may be able to improve overall average frame rate. The most important benefit is that DX12 can make a performance boost. During the heated battle, the number of objects on the screen can skyrocket and it puts additional demand on the CPU. This additional demand can cause the frame rate drop during the most critical moments of the game. Dx12 uses the CPU more efficiently so that the frame rate will drop much less when the game demands the most performance. It provides a more consistent frame rate in the game.
On the Microsoft site, it is explained that to show it, they used PresentMon to be able to gather some early performance data. Since competitive gamers really care about maximizing frame rate and minimizing latency, they lowered the graphics settings, but they set the view distance to Far. If you also do that, the specific results will be various because it depends on your exact machine configuration.
The average frame rates for DX12 were higher than DX11 where it is about 2%. DX12 was faster when it mattered most. When the game is rendering the frames which are most demanding, DX12 displays an ~ 10% average improvement in frame rate.
How to Set DX12?
If you want to try to use DX12 in Fortnite, you are able to do that by going to your Settings menu in Fortnite. There, you have to make sure that you go to Video Settings and at the very bottom of the menu, you have to choose DirectX 12 (Beta) next to DirectX Version.
AUTHOR BIO
On my daily job, I am a software engineer, programmer & computer technician. My passion is assembling PC hardware, studying Operating System and all things related to computers technology. I also love to make short films for YouTube as a producer. More at about me…
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