I wrote an article about DX12 for PC Gamer. It discusses the differences between high-level and low-level graphics APIs and what that means for gaming. It also features some insight gained from talking to Dan Baker at Oxide games about a few related topics, which was a big help.
I went a bit wild in terms of technical detail in the middle section of it, but it could be up your alley if you read my blog (and hopefully also interest some PC Gamer visitors).
I wrote an article about The Witcher 3 for PC Gamer. I focused primarily on some tips for achieving the smoothest possible gameplay, but what I’m really surprised by is the CPU results I obtained.
I might have chosen a bad location for that benchmark, and perhaps I’ll repeat it somewhere else, but I really expected an open world DX11 RPG to be more CPU-heavy. Certainly not playable with two 2.2 GHz cores at 30 FPS and 4 at 60 FPS. Very well done, and another indicator to me that seems to hint towards the gains with future low-level graphics APIs being less pronounced than some expect, outside of very specific use cases.
Of course, that level of control will at the very least be a huge boon to VR rendering, which inherently requires a high framerate, low-latency and extremely consistent performance.