Does a lower dxlevel increase your fps?

[Megamitch05]

Hi, I have a decent laptop. I can run a lot of big games on it with an alright fps but I just wanted to know if a lower dxlevel can increase fps or if a higher dxlevel increases it. For example, will dxlevel 80 run faster then dxlevel 90?

Thanks, Megamitch05.

[Kargor]

Depends on the graphics hardware and the game. Feature levels (there is no DX level, as far as I know) tell which hardware features are available, but that's just a yes/no kind of thing. It's certainly possible that a "higher" feature isn't all that fast on a particular piece of hardware, and that the game has a good replacement for systems where this feature isn't available at all, thus resulting in higher fps.

Easiest way to find out: try it out.

[Scorcher24]

Most games only use one rasterizer API, therefore you cannot just go ahead and change the DirectX version they use. This is a feature found in Source Engine, but most modern engines do that automatically and don't expose that setting or don't do it at all. At the most, they let you choose between DX12 and 11.

[Muppet among Puppets]

If reducing dx changes the amount of things that have to be rendered it can help.

[Satoru]

sort of depends

dx12 has in theory ability to grantyou better fps due to its potentially more efficient GPU pipeline. Whether a game takes advantage of that is of course the problem, and given dx12 is new many games are still having dificulty taking advantage of this