Tune your system to favour frame-rate over visual effects and you'll run into a CPU bottleneck on AMD hardware much faster than you will with the Nvidia equivalent. Advanced Warfare isn't a one-off scenario either. A Core i3 and i7 run the game in a very similar manner if you have an Nvidia card, but if you're using an AMD GPU, performance collapses whenever the system is drawing a more complex scene. We first noticed the issue back in November 2014, when we tested Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
What is directx 12 driver#
Thanks to some well-judged price adjustments and the recent arrival of 300 series graphics hardware, the red team has worthy hardware to compete with most of Nvidia's product line, but what's become increasingly apparent over the last nine months is that AMD's DirectX 11 driver is sub-optimal, particularly relevant for those looking to build a budget PC - an area where AMD offers the best theoretical price/performance level in the market. In the graphics card market, AMD is more competitive - but still faces significant challenges from its implacable rival, Nvidia. AMD still produces 32nm and 28nm processors, while Intel is now down to 14nm, giving it power efficiency advantages on top of its inherent performance improvements. Its Bulldozer architecture bet the farm on numerous, slower cores in a world where DX11-driven gaming benefits more from fewer, faster cores, giving Intel a virtually unassailable advantage. Its problems in the CPU market are well documented. In the here and how - in the era of DirectX 11 - life isn't particularly easy for AMD. We experimented with Windows 10 this week and came to a highly satisfying conclusion - DX12 offers huge advantages to virtually all PC owners, but it will be a boon to AMD in particular, perhaps going some way to restoring a degree of plurality to the PC hardware market. There's a palpable air of excitement surrounding the arrival of Windows 10 and DirectX 12 - a sense that the PC will finally shrug off the shackles holding it back and that the cutting-edge components released by AMD, Nvidia and Intel will finally reach something approaching their full potential. We also re-tested Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and found that significant issues remain with AMD's DX11 performance on less capable processors on both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. We've also replaced the AMD A10 7800 benches with the same tests run on an FX 6300 - this is a more direct equivalent to the Core i3 4130.
What is directx 12 drivers#
We originally ran this article in May 2015, but with the release this week of Windows 10, we thought we'd revisit DirectX 12 on the launch version of the OS, using the latest drivers in order to update the benchmark data.