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
Mid Quality Performance
Since our evaluation so far has been focused on performance with Star Swarm’s most resource intensive Extreme setting, we wanted to shake things up by trying a lower quality setting.
In this case Star Swarm’s various quality levels adjust both the CPU and GPU workload, with the Mid quality setting reducing both the number of draw calls generated and the amount of work generated per frame for the GPU. As a result we’re not adjusting just the CPU or the GPU workload, but it can give us an idea of what to expect from DirectX 12 and Star Swarm at lower settings more suitable for weaker systems.
Even with this lower quality setting, the CPU results tell us that only the GTX 980 is truly CPU bottlenecked with 2 cores. Everything else from the 290X on down can reach its GPU limit with a relatively weak CPU.
Overall the numbers are different, but the lineup is the same whether it’s Extreme quality or Mid quality. Every vendor still sees massive gains from enabling DirectX 12, though the overall gains aren’t quite as great as with Extreme quality. Meanwhile GTX 750 Ti in particular continues to see the weakest gains from DirectX 12, at only 14% for a 2 core configuration, thanks to a combination of NVIDIA’s lower CPU consumption and earlier GPU bottleneck.
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Stuka87 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Very promising from the looks of it. Should help out a lot with some of these newer games.One thing I wish you would have done was to show kernel times on the CPU graphs. Would be nice to know how much of that CPU was userspace, and how much was kernel.
unacomn - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Very promising results for future games.I would love to see a test with AMD CPUs as well, curious if the architecture of the current AM3+ and FM2 CPUs benefits much in terms of performance from this.
Stuka87 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
For Mantle they benefit more, as they are a larger bottleneck. With my old AMD system (965BE @4GHz with an HD7950) BF4 was unplayable with DirectX11, but with Mantle it ran pretty decent.mikato - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
It seems really strange to read that you couldn't run BF4 with those specs. I play the newest Call of Duty games with my 965BE (not overclocked) and my HD6950 unlocked to 6970. Settings are turned down a bit with my 1920x1200 resolution, but it runs well enough to play as twitchy fast as I need to be. I am in the market for an upgrade soon though so I can turn the settings back up.shing3232 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
BF4 are way more demanding than COD because there are too much object in MP especially when you playing a 64 player server.XFR - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Are these articles edited or proofread?JarredWalton - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Sometimes. I did make a reading/editing pass after this was posted, so if there are still errors let us know.Jtaylor1986 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
My only question is how is Mantle still in beta at this stage of the game? Microsoft seems to have developed DirectX 12 much more quickly than AMD has developed Mantlejeffkibuule - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
It's more likely they were unknowingly developed side-by-side, but DirectX 12 was unveiled much later. Certainly if there were new DX12-only features that require special hardware, some AMD engineers would have wondered why Microsoft was requesting XYZ when developing the Xbox One SoC vs. PS4 (not that those two groups or general engineering teams would have been able to compare notes).Khato - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
FYI - public announcement comes a long, long time after the initial specification. More importantly, directx is more of a collaboration between the players involved (Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD) any more, not something that Microsoft develops in secret and only shares once it's finalized. Which is to say that AMD has known about the direction for directx 12 for over 2 years now.