AnandTech have taken a look at the current state of DirectX 12 and it's promise of considerably improved performance.

For those that tend to skip review introductions- at the present stage of development DirectX 12 (and any drivers that make use of it) should at best be considered Alpha software, not even advanced enough to be considered a Beta release.
Many features are incomplete, not functional & for those that are the various drivers may or may not make use of them & there are known bugs with both the drivers as well as the current release of DirectX 12.
DX12 will only be available with Win10, but since there will be free upgrades for those with Win 7/8 & 8.1 this isn't such a big issue. DX12 uses WDDM2.0 which is a kernel component, re-working the older kernels to use the new software would result in major compatibility issues with existing software so it's not going to happen.


DirectX 12 preview

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Grant
Darwin NT

AnandTech have another early look at DirectX 12.

This time it's 3DMark that have developed a synthetic benchmark. It isn't for comparing different types of graphics hardware, but for comparing the difference in possible performance between DirectX 11 & DirectX DX12, and the effect of multiple CPU cores.
Many current games only make use of 2 CPU cores, quite a few titles do make use of 4- but the benefits in performance don't scale that well, often no more than 20% over 2 cores (ideally they should be double) as long as you have a GPU powerfull enough.
The tool basically produces as many draw calls as possible, until the GPU can no longer keep up. In this way, it is testing the API (Application Programming Interface) overhead. The difference between DirectX 11 & DirectX 12 is huge.


Once again for those that skip introductions- DirectX 12 & the drivers making use of it should at best be considered Alpha software. There is still a lot of work to be done on both.

3dMark DirectX 12 API Overhead benchmark tool first look

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Grant
Darwin NT