A report on Cortana is coming shortly, but we thought that Fudzilla readers would enjoy an update in DirectX 12 API a bit more. The last build we tested didn’t come with DirectX 12.
We came up with the idea to install Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, one of the latest AAA games, and tried to run in on an Intel NUC Kit D54250WYK powered with Intel Corei5-4250U processor and HD Graphics 5000, a GPU that is not cut out for this sort of work. We know this is not a gaming machine, but this is just a test drive for DirectX 12, so we wanted to give it a try. The Intel driver was the one that came with Windows 10 Build 9926.
The NUC test machine was equipped with 8GB of Kingston HyperX Impact DDR3L memory, Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 Plus Bluetooth card and a Kingston mS200 240 GB mSATA storage unit. We have to admit that this Kingston-powered Intel unit works really well and that Windows 10 feels more mature than any earlier builds of Windows 10 we tested before.
Intel NUC can score 388 MB/s read and 214 MB/s write performance, but this has to be a combination of Windows 10 early build and storage driver and NUC SSD performance. Still it boots really fast and works well despite the fact that this is an early beta.
We installed Steam and proceeded to install Call of Duty Advanced Warfare and give it a try. We didn’t want to waste our time with Assassin's Creed Unity as this would not run on such machine, at least not at acceptable frame rates.
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare is a 40GB download and after a while we got to run the game. Guess what - it worked and we were able to test it. We loaded one of the levels and the cut scene player as well. It took a long time to load a level, just as long as we experienced on another gaming PC we had in the lab.
The game worked with occasional artifacts but it was definitely at less than 20 FPS at 1920x1080 60 Hz. Once we dialed the resolution back to 1216x684 and most details to low, we got a playable frame rate.
We played a level for a while and we were mesmerised that the game didn’t crash. We saw a glitch here and there and considering that Intel HD Graphics usually experiences driver issues in new titles, we were positively surprised that it worked at all, and that it didn’t crash. Of course the game didn’t use any of the fancy DirectX 12 features as Intel HD Graphics 5000 supports DirectX 11 feature level 11.1.
The other game that we tried was South Park: The Stick of Truth and this game runs at 1920x1080 60Hz without an issue. This is out first touch with Windows 10 gaming that hides DirectX 12 under the hood. It's a small step, but DirectX 12 is coming and it is encuraging to finally see it in a Windows build.
