Battlefield™ 1 has now been on the scene for a spell, and we hope y’all are having a blast storming the trenches with powerful Great War weapons like the mighty Kolibri. Between rounds, we’ve been crunching the numbers on the new DirectX® 12 renderer in Battlefield 1’s Frostbite Engine, and AMD FX users are in for a real treat: 30-46% higher framerates!1

Here it is, plain as day:

But… how?

The secret lies in a DirectX® 12 feature “multi-threaded command buffer recording,” which we covered in detail last year. The short version is pretty straightforward: MTCBR allows a game’s “to-do list”—its geometry, texture, physics, and other requests—to be interpreted and passed to the GPU by multiple CPU cores, rather than just one or two cores as in DirectX® 11.

Because the processor can tackle the to-do list more quickly with DirectX® 12, the flow of information into the graphics card can be accelerated, which helps rendering tasks spend less time waiting around for important bits to appear.

In software as in real life: having more hands for a complex job just gets things done a little (or a lot) more quickly. See you on the Battlefield!

Robert Hallock is an evangelist for CPU/APU technologies and IP at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Testing conducted by AMD Performance Labs as of 19 October, 2016 on the AMD FX 8370, FX 8350, FX 8300, FX 6350 and FX 6300. Test system: Radeon™ RX 480 GPU, 8GB DDR3-1866, 512GB SanDisk X300 SSD, Windows 10 Pro x64, Radeon™ Software 16.9.2, 1920x1080 resolution, Ultra in-game preset. Average framerates DirectX® 11 vs. 12: AMD FX-8370 (66.9 vs. 86.9), FX-8350 (61.58 vs. 84.89), FX-8300 (58.76 vs. 80.6), FX-6350 (60.03 vs. 80.48), FX-6300 (52.38 vs. 76.24). PC manufacturers may vary configurations, yielding different results. Results may vary with future drivers. DTV-84