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
GPU Scaling
Switching gears, let’s take a look at performance from a GPU standpoint, including how well Star Swarm performance scales with more powerful GPUs now that we have eliminated the CPU bottleneck. Until now Star Swarm has never been GPU bottlenecked on high-end NVIDIA cards, so this is our first time seeing just how much faster Star Swarm can get until it runs into the limits of the GPU itself.
As it stands, with the CPU bottleneck swapped out for a GPU bottleneck, Star Swarm starts to favor NVIDIA GPUs right now. Even accounting for performance differences, NVIDIA ends up coming out well ahead here, with the GTX 980 beating the R9 290X by over 50%, and the GTX 680 some 25% ahead of the R9 285, both values well ahead of their average lead in real-world games. With virtually every aspect of this test still being under development – OS, drivers, and Star Swarm – we would advise not reading into this too much right now, but it will be interesting to see if this trend holds with the final release of DirectX 12.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that largely due to their poor DirectX 11 performance in this benchmark, AMD sees the greatest gains from DirectX 12 on a relative basis and comes close to seeing the greatest gains on an absolute basis as well. The GTX 980’s performance improves by 150% and 40.1fps when switching APIs; the R9 290X improves by 416% and 34.6fps. As for AMD’s Mantle, we’ll get back to that in a bit.
Having already established that even 2 CPU cores is enough to keep Star Swarm fed on anything less than a GTX 980, the results are much the same here for our 2 core configuration. Other than the GTX 980 being CPU limited, the gains from enabling DirectX 12 are consistent with what we saw for the 4 core configuration. Which is to say that even a relatively weak CPU can benefit from DirectX 12, at least when paired with a strong GPU.
However the GTX 750 Ti result in particular also highlights the fact that until a powerful GPU comes into play, the benefits today from DirectX 12 aren’t nearly as great. Though the GTX 750 Ti does improve in performance by 26%, this is far cry from the 150% of the GTX 980, or even the gains for the GTX 680. While AMD is terminally CPU limited here, NVIDIA can get just enough out of DirectX 11 that a 2 core configuration can almost feed the GTX 750 Ti. Consequently in the NVIDIA case, a weak CPU paired with a weak GPU does not currently see the same benefits that we get elsewhere. However as DirectX 12 is meant to be forward looking – to be out before it’s too late – as GPU performance gains continue to outstrip CPU performance gains, the benefits even for low-end configurations will continue to increase.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
245 Comments
View All Comments
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.