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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B3an - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Thanks for posting this. This is the kind of thing i come to AT for.Notmyusualid - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
And me.dragosmp - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Looking at the Dx11 vs Dx12 per core load it looks like the per-core performance is the limiting factor in Dx11, not the number of cores. As such, CPUs like the AMD's AM1 & FM2 platforms with low per-core performance would benefit from Dx12 more than Intel's CPUs that already have high IPC. (It may be that even the FX may become decent gaming CPUs with their 8 integer cores and not limited by 1-core turbo)guskline - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Thank you for a great article Ryan.okp247 - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Cheers for the article, Ryan. Very interesting subject and a good read.There seems to be issues with the AMD cards though, especially under DX11. Other testers report FPS @ mid 20's to early 30's in 1080P extreme settings even with the old 7970 under Win7/DX11.
The power consumption is also quite low. 241 watts for 290X with 6-core i7, when Crysis 3 pulls 375 also with 6-core i7 in your original review of the card. The card seems positively starved ;-)
This could be the OS, the graphics API or the game. Possibly all three. Whatever it is, it looks like a big issue that's undermining your test.
On a completely different note: maybe you could get the developer to spill the beans about their work with both APIs? (Mantle and DX12). I think that would also be a very interesting read.
OrphanageExplosion - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Yup, this is the big takeaway from this article - http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph8962/71451...AMD seems to have big issues with CPU load on DX11 - the gulf between NVIDIA and AMD is colossal. Probably not an issue when all reviews use i7s to test GPUs, but think of the more budget orientated gamer with his i3 or Athlon X4. This is the area where reviews will say that AMD dominates, but NOT if the CPU can't run the GPU effectively.
ColdSnowden - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
This reflects what I said above. 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, so perhaps Guild Wars Two would run better with an nvidia GPU as my FX 4170 would be less likely to bottleneck it.ObscureAngel - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Basically AMD now requires much better CPU than nvidia to render the same "drawcalls"I benchmarked my self recently my Phenom II X4 945 OC 3.7GHZ with my HD 7850 vs GTX 770.
Obviously GTX 770 outperform my HD 7850.
Altough i benchmarked star swarm and games where my GPU usage was very below 90% which means i was bottlenecked by the CPU.
Guess what:
Star swarm: AMD DX11: 7fps, Nvidia DX11: 17fps AMD Mantle: 24fps.
I tested Saints Row IV where i get all the time bottleneck with my AMD card where i get all the time more frames more close to 30 than 60, and with GTX 770 i get more 60 than 30.
Even NFS Rivals i have drops on GPU usage to 50% in some locations and that causes drops to 24fps.
With nvidia again, i have 30 rocking stable, unlocking the framerate i have 60 most of the time and where i drop to 24fps due to my CPU with nvidia i have 48fps.
Its not a good example since the GTX 770 is far more powerfull, but you have more proofs with weaker nvidia GPUS in low end cpus really improve the performance comparing to AMD cards that seems to require more power.
I try to contact AMD but i nobody replied ever, i even register in GURU3D since there is a guy that works on AMD, and he never replied, same goes to many persons there are just fanboys and attacked me instead of trying to make pressure for AMD to fix this.
I'm serious worried with that problem, cause my CPU is old and weak, and the extra frames that nvidia offers in DX11 is really big.
Dispite the fact that DX12 is very close to release, i am pretty sure that many games will continue to be released in DX11, and the number of games with mantle it just fit in my hand.
So i am thinking in selling my HD 7850 and buy the next 950ti just because of that, its far more economic than buy a new CPU and motherboard.
I already know this problem for more than 6 months, tried to convince everybody and trying to contact amd, but i am alway attacked by fanboys or get ignored by AMD..
So if AMD reply to me, maybe they dont like my money.
Altough nothing is free, the DX11 optimizations on Nvidia makes eat more Vram and in some games like dying light and ryse i notice more stuttering and sometimes more time to load textures..
Same goes if you use mantle, it eats more vram too.
I expect that DX12 will need more Vram too.
If 2gb is getting short lately prepare that will get shorter if it will ear more vram as Nvidia DX11 and AMD Mantle.
Regards.
okp247 - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
I think the nVidia cards are actually being gimped as well. On Win7/DX11 people are reporting 70-80 FPS @ extreme settings, 1080 with the two top 900-cards on everything from old i5's to FX's.They are just not being hurt as much as AMDs, maybe because of more mature drivers and/or different architecture.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 7, 2015 - link
Please note that we're using the RTS demo. If you're getting scores that high, you're probably using the Follow demo, which is entirely different from run-to-run.