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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.
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.
No, don't worry. I haven't seen the DirectX 12 API yet myself (I'm still working in DX9-11 land), but I'm pretty sure all this is doing is making the abstraction layer more closely match the realities of the existing hardware designs. That is, it's not eliminating the abstraction altogether, but making it a much thinner layer, so as to avoid imposing unnecessary overhead.
All the GPUs work in roughly the same manner, because they have to execute the same common shader micro-code. In order to be labeled as "DX11" or "DX12" compliant hardware, a GPU must be able to perform a minimum set of functionality. Moreover, the vast majority of this functionality is accessed via shader languages, and this doesn't change from GPU to GPU.
I'd be surprised if there was any significant divergence at all between different types of GPUs in the code at all. DirectX 12 looks like it's going to be a very good thing, both for developers and for gamers.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I know slashdot usually does not read AC, but I reply none the less.
Your post and grandparent is spot on, but I still do not think it is a problem. The ecosystem has changed a lot, "back then" basically every studio wrote their own engine, today we have three big engine makers (Epic with UE, Crytek with CryEngine, and Unity) on the market plus a few big in-house engines of the publishers that they do not license out.
A few other larger projects make their own engines, but if we are down to half a dozen major ones and another half dozen big ones we are basically there.
Small projects - and many AAA titles - just take one of the existing engines and do not bother.
There also was a large change on the manufacturer side: there are not half a dozen big card makers anymore with a whole lineup of products, we are seeing two major makers for games + intel for everything else; their chips are also based on the very few actual designs and custom-building code for these two or five bases is possible - especially as we have big engine makers who do the heavy lifting.
The heavy abstraction of old DirectX versions was the right thing to do - and the introduction of DirectX is actually one thing Microsoft did really right and we have to thank them for that. Does anyone remember the chaos in the DOS-days? - but now it is also the right thing to keep a common API but reduce the abstraction at the cost of big engine makers (putting 10s and 100s of millions in their products) and large publishers who in-house create an engine (Frostbite, for example) which fuels several AAA titles in the years to come.