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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Jeffro421 - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Something is horribly wrong with your results. I just ran this benchmark, on extreme, with a 270X 4GB and I got 39.61 FPS on DX11. You say a 290X only got 8.3 fps on DX11?http://i.imgur.com/JzX0UAa.png
Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link
You ran the Follow scenario. Our tests use the RTS scenario.Follow is a much lighter workload and far from reliable due to the camera swinging around.
0VERL0RD - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Been meaning to ask why both cards show vastly different total memory in Directx diag. Don't recall Article indicating how much memory each card had. Assuming they're equal. Is it normal for Nvidia to not report correct memory or is something else going on?Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link
The total memory reported is physical + virtual. As far as I can tell AMD is currently allocating 4GB of virtual memory, whereas NVIDIA is allocating 16GB of virtual memory.trisct - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
MS needs a lot more Windows installs to make the Store take off, but first they need more quality apps and a competitive development stack. The same app on IOS or Android is almost always noticeably smoother with an improved UI (often extra widget behaviors that the Windows tablet versions cannot match). Part of this is maturity of the software, but Microsoft has yet to reach feature parity with the competing development environments, so its also harder for devs to create those smooth apps in the first place.NightAntilli - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
We know Intel has great single core performance. So the lack of benefits for more than 4 cores is not unsurprising. The most interesting aspect would be to test the CPUs with weak single core performance, like the AMD FX series. Using the FX series rather than (only) the Intel CPUs would be more telling. 4 cores would not be enough to shift the bottleneck to the GPU with the FX CPUs. This would give a much better representation of scaling beyond 4 cores. Right now we don't know if the spreading of the tasks across multiple threads is limited to 4 cores, or if it scales equally well to 6 threads or 8 threads also.This is a great article, but I can't help feeling that we would've gotten more out of it if at least one AMD CPU was included. Either an FX-6xxx or FX-8xxx.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link
Ask and ye shall receive: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8968/star-swarm-dire...NightAntilli - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link
Thanks a lot :) The improvements are great.0ldman79 - Monday, February 16, 2015 - link
One benefit for MS to have (almost) everyone on a single OS is just how many man hours are spent patching the older OS? If they can set up the market to where they can drop support for Vista, 7 and 8 earlier than anticipated they will save themselves a tremendous amount of money.Blackpariah - Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - link
I'm just hoping the already outdated console hardware in PS4/Xbone won't hold things back too much for the pc folks. On a side note... I'm in a very specific scenario where my new gtx 970, with DX11, is getting 30-35 fps @ 1080P in battlefield 4 because the cpu is still an old Phenom 2 x4... while with my older R9 280, on Mantle, the framerate would stay above 50's at all times at almost identical graphic detail & same resolution.