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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damianrobertjones - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
??? Eh? The computer, with DX12, is working harder AND offering better results.bitcrazed - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Windows 7 will remain in broad use in businesses for a while yet, but given that Win10 will be a free upgrade for everyone else means that we should see far faster upgrades to Win10 than prior OS'.Put it this way - who here with a gaming rig or a machine they game on regularly is going to say - "No, I don't want a free upgrade to this new fangled Win10 + DX12 nonsense - I prefer to play my games at 10 fps and to gradually fade into obscurity"?
TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
Gamers also seem to upgrade at a much faster rate. windows 8+8.1 make up 30% of steam windows users, while they only make up 12% of the general market. given that its FREE, windows 10 will probably become very popular very quickly.wolrah - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Why would you say that? Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for anyone on a DX11 compatible system and so far has been a great OS to use. At the moment there's literally no reason not to upgrade.If Microsoft doesn't screw it up and the users aren't change-hating morons about it, Windows 7 and 8 should be fading memories in a year or two as far as the gaming community is concerned. Corporate users will still be themselves and be slower to upgrade, but corporate users' relevance to new gaming APIs is minimal.
aliquis - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Another stab at Valve and their SteamOS.OpenGL NG is quite a bit away and this will likely make Linux lag behind Windows in gaming again. For now.
Also with Xbox for Windows 10 I assume they may have some competition (which is likely why they wanted to migrate to Linux in the first place, because app-stores on any OS have become the standard.)
eanazag - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
I'd like to see an integrated graphics version of this. Intel and AMD APU. If you're feeling fiesty, an AMD APU with a second card in Crossfire.Question I would have in an APU related article. With APUs, does it now make even more sense to go with higher bandwidth RAM? Some suggestions for the CPUs: AMD 7850K (duh), AMD A-6, AMD A-8, Haswell (Intel 7, 5, and 3 plus a crappy Pentium), AMD Kabini (top sku), and the Crystalwell Pro.
I think this has big mobile implications. I'd like to see a choice of a performance cap at 30-60 fps and the remainder of what's left on the table delivered in less heat and longer battery life.
SparkySamza - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
what do you mean under windows 10; are you talking about windows 7 or even windows 8.1 ?tviceman - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Ryan I appreciate the depth and analysis of all your reviews. Anandtech is always my first stop for analysis of new video cards and tablets. That said, the continued tardiness of the GTX 960 review, as well as the lack of any 970 memory performance investigations is really disheartening. Especially the 960, since it's now 2 weeks today since the NDA was lifted.Keep up the analysis, and hire extra help if needed. ;)
Stuka87 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Uhm, they had an article on the 970 memory issues:http://anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-cor...
tviceman - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
They did have an article, but they didn't do any extensive investigations into performance when going over 3.5gb but staying within 4gb.