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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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.