Phill Spencer, head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has tempered any expectations gamers may have about DirectX 12 coming to Xbox One. According to Spencer, there are mainly advantages for developers, but the graphics performance does not improve much.
“Will DX12 drastically improve the graphics of the Xbox One? No,” Phill Spencer answered his own question in an interview with The Inner Circle, “The CPU, GPU and memory don’t change when you switch to DirectX 12.” According to him, the use of DX12 makes it possible to make better use of the possibilities that the Xbox One already has and he also states that improvements will be seen in games, but he repeats that they will not be drastic.
Spencer says the benefits are mostly for developers: teams working on a game that will come out on Xbox and PC variants could work cross-platform more easily. Microsoft will bring DirectX 12 support to Windows 10 next year. DirectX 12 will give developers more direct access to the graphics hardware and the platform should reduce the CPU load.
Microsoft unveiled DirectX 12 in March, indicating that games on the Xbox One would perform better. However, the software giant did not give any figures on the degree of improvement at the time. The performance of games on both the PS4 and Xbox One is the source of much debate: last week, for example, Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed: Unity will run at 30fps and a resolution of 1600×900 pixels on both consoles. Many gamers hoped that next-gen games would run at 60fps and 1080p resolution, but many games don’t.