Sniper Elite 4 Performance Review

DirectX 12 vs DirectX 11 – Nvidia Pascal and Maxwell

With both a DirectX 12 and an Async Compute options, it is very important to find out how each modern GPU architecture takes advantage of these features. We all should know that not all systems benefit from the upgrade to DirectX 12, especially with early DirectX 12 releases.  

Today we will be looking at most modern GPU architectures and will see how each is affected by DirectX 12 and Async Compute in Sniper Elite 4.

 

Pascal  

Nvidia’s GPUs have not had a great time when it came to early DirectX 12 support, though it seems Rebellion have really been able to get the most out of this new API, especially in more CPU limited workloads at 1080p.  

We can see at lower resolutions that our test system can deliver some huge performance gains at 1080p when running with DirectX 12 and can even see Async Compute have a noteworthy impact on performance. 

In more GPU limited scenarios at 1440p and 4K, we can see that the basic move to DirectX 12 actually lowers our system’s minimum and average framerate, though using Async Compute negates this difference and allows DirectX 12 to offer a faster gaming experience with more stable framerates. 

 

 

Maxwell

Nvidia’s older Maxwell GPUs see very similar benefits to the companies newer Pascal hardware, with the move to DirectX 12 giving systems with Maxwell GPUs slightly increased system performance.  

Sadly Maxwell does not offer the same levels of Async Compute support as their Pascal counterparts, which means that Async Compute actually lowers GPU performance. When using DirectX 12 Maxwell users should use DirectX 12 without Async Compute in order to achieve the best system performance.