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DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity
Vigile writes: The future of graphics APIs lies in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, both built to target GPU hardware at a lower level than previously available. The advantages are better performance, better efficiency on all hardware and more control for the developer that is willing to put in the time and effort to understand the hardware in question. Until today we have only heard or seen theoretical "peak" performance claims of DX12 compared to DX11. PC Perspective just posted an article that uses a pre-beta version of Ashes of the Singularity, an upcoming RTS utilizing the Oxide Games Nitrous engine, to evaluate and compare DX12's performance claims and gains against DX11. In the story we find five different processor platforms tested with two different GPUs and two different resolutions. Results are interesting and show that DX12 levels the playing field for AMD, with its R9 390X gaining enough ground in DX12 to overcome a significant performance deficit that exists using DX11 to the GTX 980.
The Developer now must know MORE about the underlying hardware to make the best use of Direct X 12?
This is a total step in the WRONG direction. So now having Direct X 12 hardware doesn't mean your game now just works, oh no. If you want the full experience you now must have the HARDWARE that your game was written for, or forget all this compatible Direct X stuff. How's this different from the game developer just coding directly to the video hardware of choice? That's what they do now, especially when they are funded by the video hardware guys in an effort to sell more hardware..
For this Direct X thing to really be useful, it needs to isolate the developer from the hardware implementation. You need to abstract away the vendor specifics and make the programming agnostic to what hardware it's running on... Otherwise this is all going to just going to be what it has always been, vendor lock in for specific games and drive us towards only ONE video hardware chip maker....
I think what this benchmark really tells us is two things:
1. nVidia has not optimized their driver stack for DX12 as much as AMD has optimized for DX12
2. The performance difference between AMD and nVidia is likely a software issue, not a hardware issue (nVidia's driver has a more optimized DX11 implementation than AMD's). However, it is possible that nVidia's silicon architecture is designed to run DX11 workloads better than AMD's.
Bullet #1 make sense, AMD has been developing Mantle for years now so they likely have a more mature stack for these low level APIs. Bullet #2 also makes sense, AMD/ATI's driver has been a known weak point for a long time now.
Are linux users ever going to get something that work properly? Is this shit going to be windows only?
NVIDIA is just as terrible for drivers. Just have to see the massive failure for the Windows 10 launch.
As a fairly hardcore gamer, DirectX 12 is the only reason I have (but its quite a big one) that i would switch to Windows 10, but reading over and over how badly Win 10 stomps all over users rights has me thinking even I can't justify selling out that much just for better graphics.
After reading even more today about exactly how shitty Windows 10 is, I've decided when I get home tonight I'm just going to delete the free Win 10 update iso I've already downloaded, and stick with Windows 7/DX11 and Linux for gaming from now on.
Microsofts greed and stupidity with Windows 10 has crossed the line, so there's even more of a reason now for the big PC game developers like Bethesda to finally get a clue and start making Linux versions of their games.
Yep, no need to "upgrade" to Windows NSA Edition. DX11 beats out DX12 on Nvidia, except on low detail.
DX12 is all hype.
I'll pass, even though I have all AMD hardware. Its just not worth giving up my privacy and having Big Brother MSFT snoop through everything I do just to have DX12. I love gaming but not enough to let MSFT stick a webcam over my shoulder, thx anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm more interested in the fact that the game used for benchmarking has the following in it's backstory: "Computronium became the ultimate currency."
No.. This engine's implementation *may* level the playing field for AMD but that does not mean that API does.
It is widely known that DX12 will reduce draw call overhead, making weaker CPUs perform better relative to stronger CPUs. This is of course good for AMD, since they don't have high-end CPUs anymore though it's bit of a "scorched earth" result where gamers don't need expensive CPUs at all. But if you look at "Ashes (Heavy) DX11 to DX12 Scaling - Radeon R9 390X" and look at an extremely powerful CPU like the Core i7-6700 you're seeing 50-100% gains. If you're that severely bottle-necked by a 4+ GHz quad core then this is not a typical DX11 game.
We can compare the "typical" difference between a R9 390X and GTX980 in Anandtech's bench, though I have to substitute for a R290X "Uber" so the differences should actually be even smaller. Normally these cards are almost head to head, the question is not why DX12 is closing the gap but why there's such a huge DX11 gap to begin with. And the only reason I can come up with is because they're pushing way, way more draw calls than normal. Which may be DX12 enabling developers to do things they wanted to, but couldn't before or it could be to make someone look good/bad.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Direct3D 11 introduced the capability to render with multiple threads via deferred contexts. NVidia chose to support that feature, AMD did not. Direct3D 12 mandates multithreaded rendering.
All that these results show is that AMD has higher draw call overhead than nVidia does on DX11 but DX11 and older games were not designed to make massive amounts of draw calls so it doesn't matter all that much when playing games designed for these older API's. DX12 was designed to minimize the API overhead to allow games to start drawing way more stuff and games that are designed to take advantage of this are going to suck on older API's when they support it. If developers were to write support for DX12 in their current games that don't draw much stuff then you wouldn't see nearly as much of a performance gain.
Those who haven't clued in yet: this is the same engine that was used for "unreleased game turned DX 12 synthetic benchmark" star swarm. All same caveats apply:
1. Unknown engine not available to public with unknown performance. We have no idea how DX11 implementation is made, or why DX12 is so much faster than anywhere else seen so far.
2. Is in pre-alpha, meaning performance is all over the place and a complete black box, it could render faster in DX11 in next build for all we know.
We've been there with mantle already. Specialized tech demos showing massive performance boost from using mantle over DX11. Then release, frostbite et al start supporting it and we see minimal to no performance boost outside really low end CPUs bundled with really high end GPUs.
Show me this kinds of numbers on a known engine that has a polished DX11 implementation like unreal 4 engine, and I'll actually believe you. Until then, all I see is more marketing BS.
OpenGL has existed, and has been open, for longer than Direct3D itself has. Direct3D still exists. Direct3D isn't even the current most popular graphics API if you consider mobile devices, but if you're just looking at high-end PC games, it still hasn't been dethroned and doesn't show any particular signs of being dethroned anytime soon.
Uptake of DX10/DX11 is currently over 97% amongst Steam users. As if!
PC game sales did not take a noticeable dip after Windows 8. Go ahead, show me a some sort of supporting evidence of any sort and prove me wrong. You're making the claims here.
Privacy shittyness is something to be concerned about with Windows 10, for sure. But, did you read the article you just cited, or were you taken in by its clickbaity title and stopped reading there? If you'd read it, you'd notice the entire article hinges on this EULA snippet that apparently applies to Skype and Xbox Live:
Can you tell me the last time you bought a AAA game that doesn't have similar wording in its own EULA? Oh no, they're going to... possibly update the game's DRM to prevent you from pirating it or accessing XBL with a pirated copy? How terrible?
If developers left the industry a few years ago to work on mobile games, it's probably because smartphones represent a significantly more profitable platform for successful games than the PC. Windows 8 might have nudged a few people, but the ease of multi platform development in Unity and the accessibility of smartphone development for small studios, in terms of skills and costs, are far more compelling reasons to switch.
Privacy is something to be concerned about not just on Windows but everywhere. I don't know why people focus on Microsoft when Apple and Google do similar things.
You can switch most if not all of Windows 10 "chatter" off. But if you're determined on this point just wait until 4th quarter or early next year for Vulkan, which will run on 7 (and XP) and obviously Linux. Valve have done a lot of work on this.
You're an idiot reading material written by other idiots.
Many settings you can't control, a couple of settings require the Enterprise version of Windows 10 to be effective, and Windows doesn't actually respect all of those settings anyway. This has all been discussed recently, even on Slashdot. Windows 10 is a no-go for me because of it.
"using DX11 to the GTX 980."
WTF? Americans...
"using DX11 ON the GTX 980". How difficult is that? How can you not understand what the words "to" and "on" mean?
No you can't. Didn't you see the recent proof that none of the "privacy settings" do jack shit and it still sends everything to Microsoft?
You shouldn't be in a hurry but upgrade to Windows 8.1 will be worth it eventually, with EOL in 2023 rather that 2020 and an update from WDDM 1.1 to WDDM 1.3.
NVIDIA is just as terrible for drivers. Just have to see the massive failure for the Windows 10 launch.
A tiny minority of nVidia users had a crash bug, and a new driver was rolled out a day later. That doesn't sound like massive failure to me. Massive failure is when the GUI for your driver is larger, slower, and more bloated than Adobe Reader.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OpenGL has existed, and has been open, for longer than Direct3D itself has. Direct3D still exists. Direct3D isn't even the current most popular graphics API if you consider mobile devices, but if you're just looking at high-end PC games, it still hasn't been dethroned and doesn't show any particular signs of being dethroned anytime soon.
Indeed, the only reason that Direct3D even exists is that 3dfx decided to create their own interface (GLIDE) instead of just using OpenGL. They later brought out a "MiniGL" driver which provided a reasonable subset of OpenGL, but by then the damage had been done and Microsoft had already done Direct3D. If they had just gone with OpenGL to start with, Microsoft would likely have followed suit. Microsoft never has an original idea, they only copy people. They copied 3dfx and the rest is the present, and unfortunate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Back in the DX7-9 days, OpenGL was "crap" because it has so many vendor extensions that an OGL game had to be written for a specific graphics card.
Now that DX is doing it, this is a GOOD thing.
How did that happen?
I'm hoping it'll
- Make good use of DX12
- Have a stable and performing Windows 10
- Have the new Intel processor
- Be super quiet
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
oh no. they're WELL BEYOND bad. Crapalyst is just shitastic at it's godawful bug ridden best.
as to nvidia, I suspect that it's more likely that in dx12 that they're trying to do too much with their driver and hence hindering perf or IOW that haven't gotten to the dx12 mindset yet. ...or it could just bet that particular engine/game, as this is an insignificant sample set excepting for the ati fantards, but as winter is approaching I could do with an extra space heater... .... but no I just recalled what fun crapalyst is which more than offsets any use of the additional heating capacity...
as to nvidia embedding engineers, it should end up being more important than ever, but to be competitive ati has to fix their shit drivers first and foremost, and amd needs to get their thumb out and crap out a decent cpu arch again. I'll take that even if they can only manage it at their insanely power hungry typical design levels.
If they manage it, I might even build an opteron system rather than wait for skylake-e for the next desktop, assuming they can manage a beg enough leap in processing efficiency, and get some decent mobo chipsets instead of their half baked shit that they pawn off now.
No. You didn't link this proof either.
See subject: "Yours truly" is FAR from that general statement, but you're right about these pricks attacking you here now though...
APK
P.S.=> You did rightfully cite WHY I'm personally NOT GOING FOR Windows 10, in a nutshell - the "advertising & tracking trend" MS is on has turned me away (& yes - I was offered the FREE COPY of Windows 10 too... I don't want it for those reasons most of all)... apk
I REALLY don't like the UI of Windows 8.1. I think its completely unworkable.
I use Linux for anything other than gaming, so I also don't care about Win7 EOL since it doesn't seem to stop you actually using the OS, just no more annoying alerts about ambiguous security patches that ususally don't actually anything relevant/significant anyway.
Would there be any noticeable benefit of WDDM1.3 over WDDM 1.1 if when just using Windows for gaming?
>> DX12 is all hype.
Not according to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The big issue seems to be whether the benchmark is synthetic/representative or not, but since it is really just an early version of a real game that will be released next year I tend towards believing it is legit.
I'm VERY interested in Vulkan but my fear is that all the AAA developers other than Valve will just keep assuming DirectX-only even for new games development, mostly through an incorrect belief that they're not loosing sales by failing to support Linux.
I find it very frustrating that Bethesda especially keep plodding along on their own tired old windows-only engine instead of switching to, say UT4. Apart from the Linux-support-for-free that would bring, judging from what they showed at IGN the upcoming Fallout 4 would have looked graphically a whole lot better, instead of like a DLC pack for Fallout 3 (from 2008).
I'm guessing Bethesda have a lot of money invested in their engine and the bean counters just don't see the benefit of going cross-platform. This will be easier (cheaper) with Vulkan, assuming they're going to use a next-gen API with their next release. And I've got a sneaking suspicion that when developers look at the new API landscape, Vulkan will be a no-brainer. It won't be superior to D3D 12, it'll just be installed on more machines.
what about putting
127.0.0.1 microsoft.com
in your hosts file? Would that work?
Whoever told you the hosts file is appropriate for _anything_ is a complete fuckup.
With that entry you're blocking a _single_ host called microsoft.com, not www.microsoft.com, not spycentral.microsoft.com, just _one_ host. You need an entry for _every possible_ host under microsoft.com and you still can't catch them all algorithmically without having a terabyte hosts file.
Blackholing a complete domain in a DNS resolver is a single config line and catches _everything_. Also, you're not redirecting anything to semantically dubious addresses like 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 with DNS blocking, you give a simple answer "host doesn't exist". That's not possible with the hosts file at all.
This hosts bullshit needs to die along with every idiot propagating it.
According to the article, Nvidia is faster under DX11 than DX12 at high detail. Maybe you should read it.
It won't because Microsoft has a built-in bypass for hosts in Windows 10 for anything that they want.
Normally I wouldn't bother because educating you isn't my job, but I'll link you this one time because you're a n00b to Slashdot and the internet, apparently.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/08/14/1756220/windows-10-still-phones-home-with-data-in-spite-of-privacy-settings
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft
So use Classic Shell. You'll forget that you're using Windows 8 in five minutes.
People don't only focus on Microsoft. You're either reading the wrong forums or you've got a mental block for everything but Microsoft criticism.
Windows 10 is a joke. It's filled with spyware, advertisements and they take user control away. At the same time, I don't really have anything against previous versions of Windows.
Apple is an extremely controlled, walled garden intended for non-technical people and I would never use anything made by them.
Google harvests massive amounts of data and makes horrible design changes "just because" and I don't use their services because of that. I do use an Android phone, but it's running custom firmware without any of the Google stuff.
What it comes down to is that the operating systems on my PCs are all general purpose, LOCAL operating systems. Windows 10 is trying to take a step backwards to thin client territory. If I wanted my fucking OS in the cloud, I'd be using Azure.
Except for the ugly window borders and other pet things.
I don't even like Windows 7 that much either, it's mostly fine but I hate the file manager.
The Windows 8 borders look miles better than that gaudy, video gamey shit in Windows 7. Windows 8 also properly supports multiple displays.
You also must have missed the fact that anyone can easily change the visual style of any version of Windows.
Safe to say the Troll(-1) mods downvoting this this aren't genuine but really Disagree(-1) or Shill(-1).
Windows 7 has the Home Basic version, install that and you only get the 2D desktop.
Changing visual style? with Windows 8 they removed classic look, and with Windows 7 they removed the color schemes in clasic look.. I could use a very old third party tool but it didn't include the old styles only additional ugly ones.
With Windows 8 you can get such train wreck of a theme http://kizo2703.deviantart.com...
So with Windows the easy way I found is to install 7 Home Basic and leave it alone ("Aero Basic"). I don't put it on my PC though.
Some more efficient.. things.. the most easily understandable is better multitasking on the GPU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And some.. things.. a wild guess is that it allows great performance in alt-tabbing out and in of a game. We all cordially hate Windows 8, but it is amazingly fast and smooth at showing you a Metro thing or the Charmed bar, whether you wanted it or not.
There are lots of visual themes available for Windows 8 that look great and if you still don't like any of them, you can make your own.
With Windows 7, you have to actually go and shut off all of the superfluous UI crap. With Windows 8 the default UI is minimalist and clean.