The DirectX 12 Performance Preview: AMD, NVIDIA, & Star Swarm
by Ryan Smith on February 6, 2015 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Microsoft
- NVIDIA
- DirectX 12
About a year and a half ago AMD kicked off the public half of a race to improve the state of graphics APIs. Dubbed "Mantle", AMD’s in-house API for their Radeon cards stripped away the abstraction and inefficiencies of traditional high-level APIs like DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4, and instead gave developers a means to access the GPU in a low-level, game console-like manner. The impetus: with a low-level API, engine developers could achieve better performance than with a high-level API, sometimes vastly exceeding what DirectX and OpenGL could offer.
While AMD was the first such company to publicly announce their low-level API, they were not the last. 2014 saw the announcement of APIs such as DirectX 12, OpenGL Next, and Apple’s Metal, all of which would implement similar ideas for similar performance reasons. It was a renaissance in the graphics API space after many years of slow progress, and one desperately needed to keep pace with the progress of both GPUs and CPUs.
In the PC graphics space we’ve already seen how early versions of Mantle perform, with Mantle offering some substantial boosts in performance, especially in CPU-bound scenarios. As awesome as Mantle is though, it is currently a de-facto proprietary AMD API, which means it can only be used with AMD GPUs; what about NVIDIA and Intel GPUs? For that we turn towards DirectX, Microsoft’s traditional cross-vendor API that will be making the same jump as Mantle, but using a common API for the benefit of every vendor in the Windows ecosystem.
DirectX 12 was first announced at GDC 2014, where Microsoft unveiled the existence of the new API along with their planned goals, a brief demonstration of very early code, and limited technical details about how the API would work. Since then Microsoft has been hard at work on DirectX 12 as part of the larger Windows 10 development effort, culminating in the release of the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview, Build 9926, which is shipping with an early preview version of DirectX 12.
GDC 2014 - DirectX 12 Unveiled: 3DMark 2011 CPU Time: Direct3D 11 vs. Direct3D 12
With the various pieces of Microsoft’s latest API finally coming together, today we will be taking our first look at the performance future of DirectX. The API is stabilizing, video card drivers are improving, and the first DirectX 12 application has been written; Microsoft and their partners are finally ready to show off DirectX 12. To that end, today we’ll looking at DirectX 12 through Oxide Games’ Star Swarm benchmark, our first DirectX 12 application and a true API efficiency torture test.
Does DirectX 12 bring the same kind of performance benefits we saw with Mantle? Can it resolve the CPU bottlenecking that DirectX 11 struggles with? How well does the concept of a low-level API work for a common API with disparate hardware? Let’s find out!
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OrphanageExplosion - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
On a tiny minority of titles.bloodypulp - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Battlefield 4Battlefield Hardline
Thief
Star Citizen
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare
Civilization: Beyond Earth
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Mirror's Edge 2
Sniper Elite 3
... and growing every day.
bloodypulp - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Who needs to wait for DX12? Mantle is running great for me right now. :)sireangelus - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
would you do one quick test using an 8core fx?johnny_boy - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Would have loved to see this, and some lower end CPUs even.editorsorgtfo - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
What about threaded CPUs ? for example 1 core 2 threads old pentium CPUs and 2 cores 4 threads i3 CPUs ? can you still count that them as 2 cores and 4 cores ?
I wanna ask this on the anandtech comment section but I don't have an account there XD
boe - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
What I care about are great graphics. It is a shame there is no Crytek 4 engine to show off what DX12 could do. MS should have hired the original crytek developers to create some showpiece game.Gigaplex - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
The API won't really change what you can do compared to DX11 other than reduce some system requirements. The feature levels are what provides new eye candy, and this preview doesn't cover that aspect. Wait until it hits retail, you'll probably see some fancy tech demos.Thermalzeal - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
I have one big question to ask.Since Direct X12 is resulting in significant performance gains, what is the potential for these improvements to translate over to the Xbox One? While I'm sure the Xbox One already has some of these bare metal improvements, due to the focus of the device...is it possible that DX12 will make the Xbox One more powerful than the PS4?
Ryan Smith - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
"Since Direct X12 is resulting in significant performance gains, what is the potential for these improvements to translate over to the Xbox One?"Only Microsoft really knows the answer to that one. But I would be shocked beyond belief if the XB1's D3D 11.X API didn't already implement many of these optimizations. It is after all a fixed console, where low-level APIs have been a mainstay since day one.
"is it possible that DX12 will make the Xbox One more powerful than the PS4?"
In a word, no. The best case scenario for Microsoft is that Sony implements their own low-level API (if they haven't already) and we're back at square one. APIs can't make up for hardware differences when both parties have the means and influence to create what would be similar APIs.