D3D12 is Coming! AMD Presentation

[Azix]

I'd reply to the intel comments but I don't get quite the same space as you guys do.

As far as the core count limitations of some PCs, I don't think it will matter. It will just scale. You have 4, the game uses 4 etc. They don't have to code for specific core counts, just to exploit multiple threads. 8 core might do it faster because it has more cores, but that should be expected. It will still run better on the 4 core than it would have with the other dx.

 

[IEC]

Still running on an overclocked/undervolted i5 3570k... Skylake-E or a competitive Zen might *finally* entice me to upgrade.

 

[RaulF]

Yup, i'll be keeping my combo a for long time. Just need to get a bigger SSD once the prices drop some more.

 

[RampantAndroid]

My 3770k will continue on until I see a reason to upgrade. Whenever DX12 games exist AND my 3770k becomes my bottleneck, then I'll think about the upgrade...

 

[jpiniero]

The only thing you should really expect out of DX12 (assuming devs actually use it) is lower CPU usage meaning you will hit GPU limitations that much faster and better frame rates with older/slower hardware. Which is great for people with old CPUs meaning they won't have to upgrade their CPU to play the latest titles. But you shouldn't expect any kind of big graphical increase because AAA titles for the foreseeable future are going to be designed specifically for the consoles.

 

[Eelectricity]

As far as the core count limitations of some PCs, I don't think it will matter. It will just scale. You have 4, the game uses 4 etc. They don't have to code for specific core counts, just to exploit multiple threads.

This needed to be said. It's either single thread app/game or it is multi-threaded. They don't write it use a specific number of cores or threads.

 

[Red Hawk]

Great video! Very informative. The more I hear about Direct3D 12, the more excited I get. I like the design philosophy of giving developers all the tools they need to code their games efficiently and get as much performance as possible out of the hardware, using the same techniques that console developers have access to, rather than just coming up with some new visual features that require more rendering power. The idea of asynchronous compute particularly has me excited, because there's these 8 asynchronous compute engines in my 290X designed to enable that feature but go unused in current games. At some point I'll probably have to upgrade from my 2500K (fingers crossed that Zen is a return to CPU form by AMD), but I hope to hold on to my 290X for a good long while. We'll see.

I do wonder if the explanation of how driver lists work in Direct3D 11 would have been any different from Nvidia. There is a driver command list feature, also known as deferred contexts, in Direct3D 11 that Nvidia supports but AMD never supported. I recall Richard Huddy actually mentioning the feature in a recent interview talking about low level APIs like Mantle and Direct3D 11. He said that AMD had explored that option, but decided that low-level APIs were a more effective solution and pursued that instead.

 

[TheELF]

This needed to be said. It's either single thread app/game or it is multi-threaded. They don't write it use a specific number of cores or threads.

As shown in the video,yes they do,the example with the racing game and the 6 headlights?It's 6 because there are six (available) cores on the consoles.

But people don't seem to realize that 6 cores at 1,5Ghz,and slow ones at that,are in no relation to any "real" desktop cores which can run several of these 1,5Ghz ,weak core, threads on a single core in sequence faster than the athlon could run them in parallel.

 

[NTMBK]

As shown in the video,yes they do,the example with the racing game and the 6 headlights?It's 6 because there are six (available) cores on the consoles.

Lol, nice conspiracy theory. Did you stop to think that maybe it's because lots of rally cars come with 6 headlights?

 

[TheELF]

Lol, nice conspiracy theory. Did you stop to think that maybe it's because lots of rally cars come with 6 headlights?

So it was a perfect example for a perfect situation,what's the problem?

 

[Sabrewings]

As shown in the video,yes they do,the example with the racing game and the 6 headlights?It's 6 because there are six (available) cores on the consoles.

WTF did I just read? Did you just really correlate the number of headlights on the car to the number of cores in the machine?

You're reading in to their example too much. You could just as easily run multiple shadow maps per core. What happens when more than one car is projecting light on screen?

 

[Paul98]

The only thing you should really expect out of DX12 (assuming devs actually use it) is lower CPU usage meaning you will hit GPU limitations that much faster and better frame rates with older/slower hardware. Which is great for people with old CPUs meaning they won't have to upgrade their CPU to play the latest titles. But you shouldn't expect any kind of big graphical increase because AAA titles for the foreseeable future are going to be designed specifically for the consoles.

Being designed for consoles is the reason why DX12 will be getting an increase in performance from both GPU and CPU. You have an API that will allow similar programming between consoles and PC.

 

[Paul98]

I'm not saying what developers should do, or what the industry should do. I'm not even saying what I want to happen. I'm saying what almost all developers will most certainly do - ensure that their games are smoothly playable on the current hardware of their target audience. That is the only business decision that makes sense. If a dev releases a game that requires 8+ threads for smooth gameplay and is actually amazing enough of a game that people will upgrade their rigs en masse, then so be it but that's more of a wild card, you shouldn't expect that to happen.

What does running 8+ threads have to do with having to upgrade an I5?

 

[Eelectricity]

As shown in the video,yes they do,the example with the racing game and the 6 headlights?It's 6 because there are six (available) cores on the consoles.

That is funny. You have a good sense of humor.
Wait, you were joking, right?

 

[lehtv]

What does running 8+ threads have to do with having to upgrade an I5?

i5 only has 4 threads, so if the game runs smoothly only on more than 4 threads... see where I'm going with this?

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

i5 only has 4 threads, so if the game runs smoothly only on more than 4 threads... see where I'm going with this?

An i5 has has 4 cores, it can run more simultaneous threads than that. Even doubling up (or more) on threads doesn't necessarily cause a performance hit if those threads aren't intensive enough to max the core.

 

[beginner99]

Intel hasn't hit the performance wall. They aren't even bothering to try. Look at the tiny die size of their Skylake. It's because they don't need to make anything better, they got the market monopoly already. So they sell you the smallest die for the maximum possible price.

The reason we're getting 600mm2 GPUs is purely because of the competitive nature in that market.

Wrong. Intel has been competing with itself for the last 5 years if not longer. AMDs lack of competition does not really matter. If Intel wants users to buy their new chips they must be faster than the old ones. And IMHO that is exactly why the PC market is shrinking. Less and less people need to upgrade or want to due to the lack of performance of new parts.

The new part however offer benefits in power usage both good for servers and laptops. And in case of laptops it's mostly another reasons than a slow CPU which makes users buy a new one.

So if Intel could increase performance/watt by actually increasing performance significantly without using more power they would. But it does seem it's easier to get minimal increases at less power.

 

[soccerballtux]

Wrong. Intel has been competing with itself for the last 5 years if not longer. AMDs lack of competition does not really matter. If Intel wants users to buy their new chips they must be faster than the old ones. And IMHO that is exactly why the PC market is shrinking. Less and less people need to upgrade or want to due to the lack of performance of new parts.

The new part however offer benefits in power usage both good for servers and laptops. And in case of laptops it's mostly another reasons than a slow CPU which makes users buy a new one.

So if Intel could increase performance/watt by actually increasing performance significantly without using more power they would. But it does seem it's easier to get minimal increases at less power.

what really surprises me is Microsoft not stepping up to bat to come up with an even more bloated OS.

Windows 7 is back to the speed of Vista, once you install the service packs. Rinse and repeat with W10...

personally, I'd be happy to have an XP64 install. XP was so fast...

 

[TheELF]

XP was so fast...

Yeah,the SP0 version was.

 

[MeldarthX]

what really surprises me is Microsoft not stepping up to bat to come up with an even more bloated OS.

Windows 7 is back to the speed of Vista, once you install the service packs. Rinse and repeat with W10...

personally, I'd be happy to have an XP64 install. XP was so fast...

xp up to service pack 1 was fast; service pack 2; made it about as fast as vista and 3 made it slower. *not that vista was terribly slow*

7 is faster than vista to a point; and 8 is faster than 7; same with 8.1. 10 is faster than 8.1.

but with repairs and services packs you do get some slow down

 

[Headfoot]

Every day that passes I regret more and more not buying the 2600k when I built my rig back then, and went with a 2500k.

Games built from the ground up for DX12 are going to blow minds. I also believe that Fiji and Hawaii will have interesting results under such games.

Remember though that HT improved quite a bit at Haswell. For Nehalem, Sandy and Ivy it was good but there were more cases where it slowed down code rather than sped it up

 

[Headfoot]

Also some posters here need a basics in multi core / parallel / multi thread programming...

Splitting one thread to many threads on many cores is hard and requires you to architect it that way from the ground up.

Combining many threads onto one core is trivially easy and operating systems have been doing this literally almost as long as the modern computer has existed. Since the 60s at least. Rest assured, your computer right now is running dozens to perhaps hundreds of threads on 4 or less cores as we speak.

If you have 4 cores, and each core is 2-3x more powerful than each console core, you can put 2-3x as many threads on that core and see no degradation of performance (a simplified example, but mostly true).

Given the same overhead 6 threads running on 6 xbox one cores would run significantly faster on a Sandy Bridge 2500k overclocked at 4.2 ghz. Probably faster even at stock.

 

[.vodka]

Remember though that HT improved quite a bit at Haswell. For Nehalem, Sandy and Ivy it was good but there were more cases where it slowed down code rather than sped it up

In newer games you usually see the 2600k giving the 4670/90k a hard time, for example. HT, whatever generation the CPU, is finally becoming relevant for gaming, even more so going forward with what DX12 enables.

This is what I meant with the 2600k comment. For the past years it was a complete waste to get the i7 for gaming, now it isn't. Hell, as far as last year it wasn't even a consideration. Things have changed a lot lately.

Not that an i5 won't game good, it's that now the benefits of HT extend to gaming. It didn't use to be like that. Better minimum FPS, higher averages, etc.

 

[Headfoot]

In newer games you usually see the 2600k giving the 4670/90k a hard time, for example. HT, whatever generation the CPU, is finally becoming relevant for gaming, even more so going forward with what DX12 enables.

This is what I meant with the 2600k comment. For the past years it was a complete waste to get the i7 for gaming, now it isn't. Hell, as far as last year it wasn't even a consideration. Things have changed a lot lately.

Not that an i5 won't game good, it's that now the benefits of HT extend to gaming. It didn't use to be like that. Better minimum FPS, higher averages, etc.

Ah I see your point. Definitely. It really shows how far HT and threaded software has come when the 2c/4t i3's put up as big of numbers as they do for gaming

 

[Despoiler]

I think HT will probably get a nice boost with DX12, but frankly now that we have an API that has massive scalability, it's going to be about real cores. I fully expect the E series processors to show up at the top of the benchmark lists, able to run the highest settings, or provide the most visual fidelity, etc.... However the dev is exploiting the improved CPU availability.