Battlefield 1 is just a few days from launching. In fact, owners of the Deluxe Edition have the game unlock yesterday. It's interesting that multiple publishers are using release date as a special edition bonus these days, including Microsoft's recent Windows Store releases. I'm not going to say interesting bad or good, though, because I'll leave that up to the reader to decide.

Anywho, DigitalFoundry is doing their benchmarking thing, and they wanted to see what GPU could provide a solid 60FPS when everything is maxed out (at 1080p). They start off with a DX12-to-DX12 comparison between the GTX 1060 and the RX 480. This is a relatively fair comparison, because the 3GB GTX 1060 and the 4GB RX 480 both come in at about $200, while upgrading to 6GB for the 1060 or 8GB for the 480 bumps each respective SKU up to the ~$250 price point. In this test, NVIDIA has a few dips slightly below 60 FPS in complex scenes, while AMD stays above that beloved threshold.

They also compare the two cards in DX11 and DX12 mode, with both cards using a Skylake-based Core i5 CPU. In this test, AMD's card noticed a nice increase in frame rate when switching to DirectX 12, while NVIDIA had a performance regression in the new API. This raises two questions, one of which is potentially pro-NVIDIA, and the other, pro-AMD. First, would the original test, if NVIDIA's card was allowed to use DirectX 11, show the GTX 1060 more competitive against the DX12-running RX 480? This brings me to the second question: what would the user see? A major draw of Mantle-based graphics APIs is that the application has more control over traditionally driver-level tasks. Would 60 FPS in DX12 be more smooth than 60 FPS in DX11?

I don't know. It's something we'll need to test.