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
First Thoughts
Bringing our preview of DirectX 12 to a close, what we’re seeing today is both a promising sign of what has been accomplished so far and a reminder of what is left to do. As it stands much of DirectX 12’s story remains to be told – features, feature levels, developer support, and more will only finally be unveiled by Microsoft next month at GDC 2015. So today’s preview is much more of a beginning than an end when it comes to sizing up the future of DirectX.
But for the time being we’re finally at a point where we can say the pieces are coming together, and we can finally see parts of the bigger picture. Drivers, APIs, and applications are starting to arrive, giving us our first look at DirectX 12’s performance. And we have to say we like what we’ve seen so far.
With DirectX 12 Microsoft and its partners set out to create a cross-vendor but still low-level API, and while there was admittedly little doubt they could pull it off, there has always been the question of how well they could do it. What kind of improvements and performance could you truly wring out of a new API when it has to work across different products and can never entirely avoid abstraction? The answer as it turns out is that you can still enjoy all of the major benefits of a low-level API, not the least of which are the incredible improvements in CPU efficiency and multi-threading.
That said, any time we’re looking at an early preview it’s important to keep our expectations in check, and that is especially the case with DirectX 12. Star Swarm is a best case scenario and designed to be a best case scenario; it isn’t so much a measure of real world performance as it is technological potential.
But to that end, it’s clear that DirectX 12 has a lot of potential in the right hands and the right circumstances. It isn’t going to be easy to master, and I suspect it won’t be a quick transition, but I am very interested in seeing what developers can do with this API. With the reduced overhead, the better threading, and ultimately a vastly more efficient means of submitting draw calls, there’s a lot of potential waiting to be exploited.
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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.