In the graphics card market, AMD is more competitive - but still faces significant challenges from its implacable rival, Nvidia. AMD still produces 32nm and 28nm processors, while Intel is now down to 14nm, giving it power efficiency advantages on top of its inherent performance improvements.

Its Bulldozer architecture bet the farm on numerous, slower cores in a world where DX11-driven gaming benefits more from fewer, faster cores, giving Intel a virtually unassailable advantage. Its problems in the CPU market are well documented. In the here and how - in the era of DirectX 11 - life isn't particularly easy for AMD. We experimented with Windows 10 this week and came to a highly satisfying conclusion - DX12 offers huge advantages to virtually all PC owners, but it will be a boon to AMD in particular, perhaps going some way to restoring a degree of plurality to the PC hardware market. There's a palpable air of excitement surrounding the arrival of Windows 10 and DirectX 12 - a sense that the PC will finally shrug off the shackles holding it back and that the cutting-edge components released by AMD, Nvidia and Intel will finally reach something approaching their full potential. We also re-tested Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and found that significant issues remain with AMD's DX11 performance on less capable processors on both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

We've also replaced the AMD A10 7800 benches with the same tests run on an FX 6300 - this is a more direct equivalent to the Core i3 4130. We originally ran this article in May 2015, but with the release this week of Windows 10, we thought we'd revisit DirectX 12 on the launch version of the OS, using the latest drivers in order to update the benchmark data.

Directx 12 drivers for windows 10