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!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
245 Comments
View All Comments
lilmoe - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
These tests should totally NOT be done on a Core i7....tipoo - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
He also has an i5 and i3 in there...?Gigaplex - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
He has an i7 with some cores disabled to simulate i5 and i3.ColdSnowden - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Why do AMD radeons have a much slower batch submission time? Does that mean that using an Nvidia card with a faster batch submission time can lessen cpu bottlenecking, even if DX11 is held constant?junky77 - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Also, what about testing with AMD APUs and/or CPUs.. this could make a change in this areaWaltC - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Very good write-up! My own thought about Mantle is that AMD pushed it to light a fire under Microsoft and get the company stimulated again as to D3d and the Windows desktop--among other things. Prior to AMD's Mantle announcement it wasn't certain if Microsoft was ever going to do another version of D3d--the scuttlebutt was "No" from some quarters, as hard as that was to believe. At any rate, as a stimulus it seems to have worked as a couple of months after the Mantle announcement Microsoft announces D3d/DX12, the description of which sounded suspiciously like Mantle. I think that as D3d moves ahead and continues to develop that Mantle will sort of hit the back burners @ AMD and then, like an old soldier, just fade away...;) Microsoft needs to invest heavily in DX/D3d development in the direction they are moving now, and I think as the tablet fad continues to wane and desktops continue to rebound that Microsoft is unlikely to forget its core strengths again--which means robust development for D3d for many years to come. Maximizing hardware efficiencies is not just great for lower-end PC gpus & cpus, it's also great for xBone & Microsoft's continued push into mobile devices. Looks like clear sailing ahead...;)Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
"Prior to AMD's Mantle announcement it wasn't certain if Microsoft was ever going to do another version of D3d"Although I don't have access to the specific timelines, I would strongly advice not conflating the public API announcements with development milestones.
Mike Mantor (AMD) and Max McMullen (MS) may not go out and get microbrews together, but all of the major players in this industry are on roughly the same page. DX12 would have been in the drawing board before the public announcement of Mantle. Though I couldn't say which API was on the drawing board first.
at80eighty - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Great article. Loved the "first thoughts" endingHisDivineOrder - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I have to say, I expected Mantle to do a LOT better for AMD than DX12 would simply because it would be more closely tailored to the architecture. I mean, that's what AMD's been saying forever and a day now. It just doesn't look true, though.Perhaps it's AMD sucks at optimization because Mantle looks as optimized for AMD architecture as DX11 is in comparison to their overall gains. Meanwhile, nVidia looks like they've been using all this time waiting on DX12 to show up to really hone their drivers to fighting shape.
I guess this is what happens when you fire large numbers of your employees without doing much about the people directing them whose mistakes are the most reflected by flagging sales. Then you go and hire a few big names, trumpet those names, but you don't have the "little people" to back them up and do incredible feats.
Then again, it probably has to do with the fact that nVidia's released a whole new generation of product while AMD's still using the same product from two years ago that they've stretched thin across multiple quarters via delayed releases and LOTS of rebrands and rebundling.
Jumangi - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
No it was because Mantle only worked on AMD cards and NVidia has about 2/3 of the discrete graphics card market so most developers never bothered. Mantle never had a chance for widespread adoption.