At its Siggraph 2014 booth, Intel is showing off one of the first public demos of DirectX 12 and Direct3D 12 -- and the improvement over older graphics APIs, such as DirectX 11, is really quite startling. The exact same demo under DirectX 12 consumed 50% less power than the DirectX 11 version. In a similar demo, the higher efficiency and lower overheads of DX12 allowed for a 60% increase in frame rate over DX11 while consuming the same amount of power. After an awful lot of talk about the benefits of Mantle, DirectX 12, and OpenGL NG, it's very exciting to see an example of the actual real-world gains of these new graphics APIs.