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 ESTThe Performance Impact of Asynchronous Shading
Finally, let’s take a look at Ashes’ latest addition to its stable of DX12 headlining features; asynchronous shading/compute. While earlier betas of the game implemented a very limited form of async shading, this latest beta contains a newer, more complex implementation of the technology, inspired in part by Oxide’s experiences with multi-GPU. As a result, async shading will potentially have a greater impact on performance than in earlier betas.
Update 02/24: NVIDIA sent a note over this afternoon letting us know that asynchornous shading is not enabled in their current drivers, hence the performance we are seeing here. Unfortunately they are not providing an ETA for when this feature will be enabled.
Since async shading is turned on by default in Ashes, what we’re essentially doing here is measuring the penalty for turning it off. Not unlike the DirectX 12 vs. DirectX 11 situation – and possibly even contributing to it – what we find depends heavily on the GPU vendor.
All NVIDIA cards suffer a minor regression in performance with async shading turned on. At a maximum of -4% it’s really not enough to justify disabling async shading, but at the same time it means that async shading is not providing NVIDIA with any benefit. With RTG cards on the other hand it’s almost always beneficial, with the benefit increasing with the overall performance of the card. In the case of the Fury X this means a 10% gain at 1440p, and though not plotted here, a similar gain at 4K.
These findings do go hand-in-hand with some of the basic performance goals of async shading, primarily that async shading can improve GPU utilization. At 4096 stream processors the Fury X has the most ALUs out of any card on these charts, and given its performance in other games, the numbers we see here lend credit to the theory that RTG isn’t always able to reach full utilization of those ALUs, particularly on Ashes. In which case async shading could be a big benefit going forward.
As for the NVIDIA cards, that’s a harder read. Is it that NVIDIA already has good ALU utilization? Or is it that their architectures can’t do enough with asynchronous execution to offset the scheduling penalty for using it? Either way, when it comes to Ashes NVIDIA isn’t gaining anything from async shading at this time.
Meanwhile pushing our fastest GPUs to their limit at Extreme quality only widens the gap. At 4K the Fury X picks up nearly 20% from async shading – though a much smaller 6% at 1440p – while the GTX 980 Ti continues to lose a couple of percent from enabling it. This outcome is somewhat surprising since at 4K we’d already expect the Fury X to be rather taxed, but clearly there’s quite a bit of shader headroom left unused.
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knightspawn1138 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I think that Radeon's advantage in DX12 comes from the fact that most of DX12's new features were similar to features AMD wrote into the Mantle API. They've been designing their recent cards to take advantage of the features they built for Mantle, and now that DX12 includes many of those features, their cards essentially get a head-start in optimization.If Radeon and NVidia were running a 100-yard dash, it just means that Radeon's starting block is about 5-yards ahead of NVidia's. I (personally) think that NVidia's still the stronger runner, and they easily have the potential to catch up to Radeon's head start if they optimize their drivers some more. And, honestly, a 4fps gap should not be enough of a reason to walk away from whichever brand you already prefer.
I still prefer NVidia due to the lower power consumption, friendlier drivers, 3D glasses, and game streaming they've had for a few years. I used to like ATI cards, but when the Catalyst Control Center started sucking more cycles out of my CPU than the 3D games, I switched to NVidia.
I would also like to have seen the GTX 970 in some of these benchmarks. I understand benchmarking the highest-end cards, but I hope that when the game is out of beta and being used as an official DX12 benchmark, we get some numbers from the more affordable cards.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Of course Nvidia's performance doesnt go up under DX12. That is no doubt intentional. Why would they improve their current cards when they can sell all new ones to the same gullible fools that fell for that trick the last time around?Denithor - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I had exactly the same thought. AMD may have shot themselves in the foot. Everyone using their cards is going to see a 10-20% boost in performance, meaning they may not need an upgrade this cycle.silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Perhaps, but DX12's lower overhead would just encourage devs to make even more complex scenes. Result: same performance, better visuals.All the people jumping on NVIDIA need to be careful, as there's parts of the DX12 spec that they support better than AMD. Give it a year to eighteen months and we'll see how this pans out.
K_Space - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
Having read all 13 pages of comments I was surprised no one mentioned this either. I'll certainly be keeping my 295x2 for at least the next 18 months if not 24 months. With AFR and VR coming up, Dual GPUs is the way to go.Drake O - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I was really hoping to see the benefits of sharing workload with the iGPU. Not everyone has multiple GPUs(but I do) but most people have a CPU with onboard graphics. If people with graphics cards can finally start using this recourse that would be a very good thing for a tremendous number of users. Please follow this article up as soon as possible with one on this area. Maybe one percent of users have different brand video cards laying around, maybe five percent have multiple similar GPUs but almost everyone has a video card and an unused iGPU on their CPU. This is the obvious first direction to take.rhysiam - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
This is (sort of) covered in the article and covered clearly in the comments above. This particular game is only using AFR, and the devs have clearly said (as noted in the article) that you'll never get more than double the performance of the slower graphics solution. Just about any discrete GPU worth of the name will be more than double the performance of an IGP and therefore is better (for this game) run on its own.DX12 opens up a raft of possibilities to use any and all available graphics resources, including IGPs, but it leaves the responsibility entirely with the game developers. For this game at this time, the devs aren't looking to make use of onboard graphics unless it's paired with a similarly anaemic GPU.
Drake O - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
If virtually everyone can boost their framerate by 20% at no cost then it is a big thing. Most people want one processor and one video card. Multiple video cards offer a very real performance boost but there is a downside, more power, more heat and frequent compatibility issues. With DX12 developers can send the post processing to the iGPU and let the video card handle the rest. Again a 20% performance boost for free. Only then should you think about the much smaller market that wants to run with multiple video cards.Kouin325 - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
yes indeed they will be patching DX12 into the game, AFTER all the PR damage from the low benchmark scores is done. Nvidia waved some cash at the publisher/dev to make it a gameworks title, make it DX11, and to lock AMD out of making a day 1 patch.This was done to keep the general gaming public from learning that the Nvidia performance crown will all but disappear or worse under DX12. So they can keep selling their cards like hotcakes for another month or two.
Also, Xbox hasn't been moved over to DX12 proper YET, but the DX11.x that the Xbox one has always used is by far closer to DX12 than DX11 for the PC. I think we'll know for sure what the game was developed for after the patch comes out. If the game gets a big performance increase after the DX12 patch then it was developed for DX12, and NV possibly had a hand in the DX11 for PC release. If the increase is small then it was developed for DX11,
Reason being that getting the true performance of DX12 takes a major refactor of how assets are handled and pretty major changes to the rendering pipeline. Things that CANNOT be done in a month or two or how long this patch is taking to come out after release.
Saying "we support DirectX12" is fairly ease and only takes changing a few lines of code, but you won't get the performance increases that DX12 can bring.
Kouin325 - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
yes indeed they will be patching DX12 into the game, AFTER all the PR damage from the low benchmark scores is done. Nvidia waved some cash at the publisher/dev to make it a gameworks title, make it DX11, and to lock AMD out of making a day 1 patch.This was done to keep the general gaming public from learning that the Nvidia performance crown will all but disappear or worse under DX12. So they can keep selling their cards like hotcakes for another month or two.
Also, Xbox hasn't been moved over to DX12 proper YET, but the DX11.x that the Xbox one has always used is by far closer to DX12 than DX11 for the PC. I think we'll know for sure what the game was developed for after the patch comes out. If the game gets a big performance increase after the DX12 patch then it was developed for DX12, and NV possibly had a hand in the DX11 for PC release. If the increase is small then it was developed for DX11,
Reason being that getting the true performance of DX12 takes a major refactor of how assets are handled and pretty major changes to the rendering pipeline. Things that CANNOT be done in a month or two or how long this patch is taking to come out after release.
Saying "we support DirectX12" is fairly ease and only takes changing a few lines of code, but you won't get the performance increases that DX12 can bring.