Ashes of the Singularity Revisited: A Beta Look at DirectX 12 & Asynchronous Shading
by Daniel Williams & Ryan Smith on February 24, 2016 1:00 PM ESTDirectX 12 vs. DirectX 11
Now that we’ve had the chance to look at DirecX 12 performance, let’s take a look at things with DirectX 11 thrown into the mix. As a reminder, while the two rendering paths are graphically identical, the DirectX 12 path introduces the latter’s multi-core scalability along with asynchronous shading functionality. The game and the underlying Nitrous engine is designed to take advantage of both, but particularly the multi-core functionality as the game pushes some very high batch counts.
Given that we had never benchmarked Ashes under DirectX 11 before, what we had been expecting was a significant performance regression when switching to it. Instead what we found was far more surprising.
On the RTG side of matters, there is a large performance gap between DX11 and DX12 at all resolutions, increasing with the overall performance of the video card being tested. Even on the R9 290X and the 7970, using DX12 is a no brainer, as it improves performance by 20% or more.
The big surprise however is with the NVIDIA cards. For the more powerful GTX 980 Ti and GTX 780 Ti, NVIDIA doesn’t gain anything from the DX12 rendering path; in fact they lose a percent or two in performance. This means that they have very good performance under DX11 (particular the GTX 980 Ti), but it’s not doing them any favors under DX12, where as we’ve seen RTG has a rather consistent performance lead. In the past NVIDIA has gone through some pretty extreme lengths to optimize the CPU usage of their DX11 driver, so this may be the payoff from general optimizations, or even a round of Ashes-specific optimizations.
Breaking down the gains on a percentage basis at 1080p, the most CPU-demanding resolution, we find that the Fury X picks up a full 50% from DX12, followed by 29% and 23% for the R9 290X and 7970 respectively. Meanwhile at the opposite end of the spectrum are the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 780 Ti, who lose 1% and 3% respectively.
Finally, right in the middle of all of this is the GTX 680. Given what happens to the architecturally similar GTX 780 Ti, this may be a case of GPU memory limitations (this is the only 2GB NVIDIA card in this set), as there’s otherwise no reason to expect the weakest NVIDIA GPU to benefit the most from DX12.
Overall then this neatly illustrates why RTG in particular has been so gung-ho about DX12, as Ashes’ DX12 path has netted them a very significant increase in performance. To some degree however what this means is a glass half full/half empty full situation; RTG gains so much from DX12 in large part because of their poorer DX11 performance (especially on the faster cards), but on the other hand a “simple” API change has unlocked a great deal of GPU power that wasn’t otherwise being used and vaulted them well into the lead. As for NVIDIA, is it that their cards don’t benefit from DX12, or is it that their DX11 driver stack is that good to begin with? At the end of the day Ashes is just a single game – and a beta game at that – but it will be interesting to see if this is a one-off situation or if it becomes recurring.
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tuxRoller - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
It's the simpler drivers which provide less room to hide architectural deficiencies.My point was that, across the board, gcn improves its performance a good deal relative to d3d11. That includes cards that are four years old. I don't think Maxwell is older than that.
I don't think we are really disagreeing, though.
RMSe17 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Nowhere near as bad as the DX9 fiasco back in the FX 5xxx days where a low level ATi card would demolish the highest end GeForcept2501 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Few if anyone here is going to remember the fiasco when the radeon 9700 pro demolished the competition in performance and stability. Even fewer remember nvidia "optimizing" games with lower quality textures to compete.dray67 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I remember it and it was the reason I went for the 9700 and the later 9800, atm I'm back to Nvidia I've had 2 AMD card die on me due to heat, as much as I like them I've had my fingers burnt and moved away from them, if dx12 and dual gpu support becomes better supported I'll buy a high AMD card in an instant.knightspawn1138 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I remember it clearly. My Radeon 9800 was the last ATI card I bought. I loved it for years, and only ended up replacing it with an NVidia card when the Catalyst Control Center started sucking all the cycles out of my CPU. It's funny that half of the comments on this article complain that NVidia's drivers are over-optimized for every specific game, yet ATI and AMD were content to allow the CCC to be a resource hog that ruined even non-gaming performance for years. I'm happy with my NVidia cards. I've been able to easily play all modern games with great performance using a pair of GTX 460's, and recently replaced those with a GTX 970.xenol - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Considering there aren't any other async shader games in development and nothing announced and with Pascal coming within the next year (which maybe, a game might actually use DX12) which will probably alleviate the situation, your evaluation of NVIDIA's situation is pretty poor.It takes more than a generation or a game to make a hardware company go down. NVIDIA suffered plenty during its GeForce FX days, and it got right back on its feet.
MattKa - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
No, no, no. An RTS game that probably isn't going to sell very well and seems incredibly lacking is going to destroy Nvidia.gamerk2 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
AMD has had an async compute engine in their GPUs going back to the 7000 series. NVIDIA has not. Stands to reason AMD would do better in async compute based benchmarking.Let's see how Pascal compares, since it's being designed with DX12, and async compute, in mind.
agentbb007 - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
"NVIDIA telling us that async shading is not currently enabled in their drivers", yeah this pretty much sums it up. This beta stuff is interesting but just that beta...JlHADJOE - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
The GTX 680 seems to have done well though. I feel like Maxwell is being let down by the compromises Nvidia made optimizing for FP16 only and sacrificing real compute performance.