I never played Crysis 2 in DX11 so couldn't answer on that one. I remember reading it tanked performance but that was due to the over tessellation issues you mention. It looked more than good enough in DX9 and absolutely flew any way. Plus IIRC it was not even released as a DX11 game, the patch came later.
Metro 2033? never played it until Redux. I own them both now and Last Light is one of my favourite games of all time but 2033 seemed to be harsh when it came to difficulty and I lost my rag with it. It feels far more primitive than LL and never got good reviews any way.
However, one thing you are not taking into account here I feel is that DX11 bought *serious* visual upgrades. Ones that you could flick a switch and turn on and off to see just what it was doing (Heaven for example, oh and Crysis 2). So the performance hit was kind of expected, given we were going to a new level.
However, DX12 brings no such improvements whatsoever. It was designed (apparently) solely to reduce the overheads on your CPU and let the GPU do the work. We were told (erroneously) that older hardware would perform better under DX12 than DX11. Which is not the case so far. DX12 actually performs within a margin of error or in this case, worse.
If there was a good DX12 title that actually demonstrated the improvements then I would be far less inclined to give it a hard time. If devs had worked with M$ (and the other way around also !) I would not have the argument that I do. But it seems neither have a jar of glue what the hell they are doing and so we've got crap as usual.
Of course, DX12 would probably look less worse if it were not for the fact that we have been physically shown what happens when an API plays ball in the way DX12 is supposed to. Look at Vulkan and the gigantic performance increase you get when using it. It's not even in the ball park, or country, or planet.
*that* is what we were promised with DX12. All we've got instead are games with training wheels attached to them whilst the so called experts learn how to balance. And these are supposed to be the professionals.
I don't understand why you keep complaining. No game has been built entirely on DX12 based engines. You aren't going to see the benefits.
In addition, you'd be better off testing with slower CPUs vs faster CPUs to see if it's actually helping. That's where benefits come from, DX12 is all about the CPU, being GPU limited in both cases doesn't showcase anything besides the fact that if they are equal performance in DX11/12 then it's actually working correctly. Any gains would be marked as very successful.
See also - Vulkan and the correct way to do it. I'm complaining because this supposed new gen of games that were going to perform much better than the old ones are actually worse than the old ones in pretty much every way.
