> sometimes more performant.

That's usually due to:

1. Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)

2. Less OS overhead (usually minor gains)

> Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)

That's not at all how that works. DirectX12 isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination. In my personal and professional experience Vulkan is about on par depending on the driver. The main differences are in CPU cost, the GPU ultimately runs basically the same code.

There's no magic Vulkan can pull out of thin air to be faster than DX12, they're both doing basically the same thing and they're not far off the "speed of light" for driving the GPU hardware.

Not all games are DX12 though.

Emulating DX11 and below, as well as OpenGL, using Vulkan does not confer any performance benefits. In fact, it’s really hard to surpass them that way.

The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.

There's really no reason why DirectX 12 can't be as fast as Vulkan. In fact, the fact that converting DirectX to Vulkan makes it faster sort of proves that point.

3. Superior CPU schedulers, which do not ever undergo serious regressions that are not ever fixed: https://x.com/SheriefFYI/status/1856356547875541196

https://x.com/itsHemu2K/status/1887359825731899587

https://x.com/fREQUENCYCS/status/2003057996302049603

Windows is notoriously slow at opening files. So a common optimisation is to store all game content in few package files.

most games I'm getting 1% lows that are much higher than windows at 4k resolution