I'll reiterate what I said then - Star Swarm is a tech demo, not a final shipping product. The first thing people are going to notice is that the GTX 980 is far faster than the R9 290X in a benchmark that was (rightly) believed to favor AMD as a matter of course when the company released it last year. At the Extreme preset we see several interesting results: Image courtesy of Anandtech The preview is quite extensive, they test the GTX 980 against multiple AMD cards in multiple CPU and GPU configurations and I don't want to spoil their thunder.

Windows 10 uses version 2.0 of the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), which means that a great deal of under-the-hood work has changed between Windows 8.1 and the latest version of the operating system. The drivers from AMD and Nvidia are pre-production, obviously, and the underlying OS it itself in a pre-RTM state. D3D12 support is baked into Windows 10, but the code is early.

The performance data in Anandtech's comparison should be taken with a significant grain of salt. Now, a new head-to-head comparison puts AMD and Nvidia head-to-head in the test - only this time, they're both running under DirectX 12. One of the demos that Sunnyvale used to show off its new API was Star Swarm, a tech demo and next-generation engine from Oxide Games. It's been just over a year since AMD launched its next-generation Mantle API, with the promise that low-overhead gaming would dramatically boost frame rates and lead to fundamentally new types of game engines.

Directx 12 win 8.1