We’ve known about new upcoming Civilization VI and some of its gameplay features already, however we didn’t really know much about its technology backend. Luckily today a press release from AMD and Firaxis brought some exciting news regarding DirectX 12 and more.

Civilization VI to support DX12, Explicit Multi-Adapter and Asynchronous Compute

Firaxis has supported Mantle low-level API in their last title called Civilization Beyond Earth so it should come no suprise that they are doing this again with DirectX 12. With Civilization VI they are partnering with AMD to bring DirectX 12 into the game along with new features. These features are Explicit Multi-Adapter and Asynchronous Compute. Explicit Multi-Adapter allows you to mix AMD and Nvidia GPUs in a multi-GPU setups. Only game which currently supports this feature is Ashes of the Singularity, so it’s nice to see more adoption of this feature. Asynchronous Compute helps to better utillize GPU resources. This feature however is currently only available on AMD however we do hope Nvidia adds a support of this feature as well.

As for DirectX 12 advantages itself? Civilization games are mostly CPU bound, especially during game turns. We all know how long turns take when we are at 300+ turns right? DX12 should help with better CPU utillization and hopefully decreasing turn times and helping weaker CPUs.

DX12 has been gaining a lot of attention lately. More and more games are being announced to support this API. However we still have to wait and see what actual real world advantages are these features going to bring. Luckily these advantages should be easily testable because Firaxis is implementing a benchmarking tool into Civilization VI.