When developing the new Star Control game, we had an opportunity to see how far along the Vulkan and DirectX 12 tech was.  The answer, at the time, was not as far as we would have liked.  

In the end, Star Control: Origins shipped using only DirectX 11 because there just wasn't enough of a difference between DX11 and the new APIs even though the game sure could have benefited, especially on the planet, from the features of DX12 and Vulkan.

You might be wondering, what is the big deal about DX12 and Vulkan versus the old DirectX11?

There are a lot of differences but the big one is that DirectX 12 and Vulkan can have multiple threads sending commands to the GPU at the same time.  This means that complex scenes can be composited in various threads asynchronously so that you get the most out of your video card.

Now that most of us have several cores on our CPU, there's no reason to have only a single core talking to your graphics card.

The goal of this benchmark is to help users and our friends at AMD and NVIDIA and Intel to see how well their GPUs are doing with DirectX 12 and Vulkan.  Over time, we hope to see the DX12 and Vulkan scores pull away from the DX11 scores (and we'll be updating the benchmark as new DX12 and Vulkan improvements come in).

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.