DirectX11 vs DirectX12 Ashes of Singularity Benchmark (R9 280X)

Mercennarius

Senior member
Oct 28, 2015
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Decided to run the Ashes of Singularity Benchmark on my system and compare the DX11 vs DX12 results. This is with my dual X5690s and a MSI R9 280X on High settings:

DX11 (high settings):
JfrCkpv.jpg


DX12 (high settings):
pNxrhD2.jpg


As you can see above just switching to DX12 increased my average frames per second by 41.3%. I also noticed DX12 seemed to have less variance in benchmarks as out of the 3 tests I did for each all were within 3% on the average FPS. DX11 had a variance over 10% on the tests with this result being the best.

For reference the same test ran on the minimum graphics settings:

DX11 (low settings):
zxHhTGe.jpg


DX12 (low settings):
SIOWc1t.jpg


With the graphics turned all the way down and keeping the resolution the same DX12 scored an average of 86.6% higher FPS than DX11 on my setup.
 
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Dygaza

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Oct 16, 2015
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Just curious, what are your ram speeds? I gained roughly 20fps cpu performance by upgrading from DDR3 1600 to 2400. So game really relies of ram speed.

Just curious as with all those cores you should be hitting way over 100 fps in benchmark, as my i7-3770k (@4.2GHz) hits 120fps in cpu performance.
 

guskline

Diamond Member
Apr 17, 2006
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Nice job Mercennarius, thanks for posting! You sure have enough cpu cores!:thumbsup::D
 
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Mercennarius

Senior member
Oct 28, 2015
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Just curious, what are your ram speeds? I gained roughly 20fps cpu performance by upgrading from DDR3 1600 to 2400. So game really relies of ram speed.

Just curious as with all those cores you should be hitting way over 100 fps in benchmark, as my i7-3770k (@4.2GHz) hits 120fps in cpu performance.

Yeah my Ram is only DDR 1333 so i'm sure that's holding me back some. I'm also only at stock clocks on my processors.
 

nanaki333

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Sep 14, 2002
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i should test with my nvidia cards. the very early results i saw showed AMD getting significantly improved performance vs nvidia, but things may have changed now that there's real benchies. i'm no gfx fanboy. i'll get whatever is the latest and greatest and may have to make the switch to AMD. course, some of the benches with that same demo showed the best results with 1 of each flagship.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
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Just curious, what are your ram speeds? I gained roughly 20fps cpu performance by upgrading from DDR3 1600 to 2400. So game really relies of ram speed.

Just curious as with all those cores you should be hitting way over 100 fps in benchmark, as my i7-3770k (@4.2GHz) hits 120fps in cpu performance.

But does that CPU 20FPS translate to any added average FPS?

I'm a bit confused by what that CPU FPS reading means in these benchmarks. What does it actually do for you to increase it?
 

Mercennarius

Senior member
Oct 28, 2015
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But does that CPU 20FPS translate to any added average FPS?

I'm a bit confused by what that CPU FPS reading means in these benchmarks. What does it actually do for you to increase it?

The CPU FPS tells you what your FPS could be if you had no GPU bottlenecks.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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i should test with my nvidia cards. the very early results i saw showed AMD getting significantly improved performance vs nvidia, but things may have changed now that there's real benchies. i'm no gfx fanboy. i'll get whatever is the latest and greatest and may have to make the switch to AMD. course, some of the benches with that same demo showed the best results with 1 of each flagship.

I wouldn't base anything on pre alpha benchmarks. Or maybe beta with Fable if lucky.
 

Dygaza

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Oct 16, 2015
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But does that CPU 20FPS translate to any added average FPS?

I'm a bit confused by what that CPU FPS reading means in these benchmarks. What does it actually do for you to increase it?

It did increase my average fps aswell. Though that was in old version of the game, since then they have improved cpu performance in new patches a lot. This was the case before:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28542438&postcount=858

And more recent performance after game updates:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28681695&postcount=250

Different settings in 2 different tests, but you see way higher cpu performance , even in higher settings.

Like been said many times, game is still in development and there's going to be performance optimisations in every fields.
 
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bystander36

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Apr 1, 2013
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It did increase my average fps aswell. Though that was in old version of the game, since then they have improved cpu performance in new patches a lot. This was the case before:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28542438&postcount=858

And more recent performance after game updates:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28681695&postcount=250

Different settings in 2 different tests, but you see way higher cpu performance , even in higher settings.

Like been said many times, game is still in development and there's going to be performance optimisations in every fields.

My point is that you shouldn't go out and upgrade memory speed so your CPU FPS can improve unless there is real benefits. As has been shown by many RAM tests over at Tom's Hardware, it rarely has any affect on gaming, or at best, a couple percent improvements.
 

Mercennarius

Senior member
Oct 28, 2015
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My point is that you shouldn't go out and upgrade memory speed so your CPU FPS can improve unless there is real benefits. As has been shown by many RAM tests over at Tom's Hardware, it rarely has any affect on gaming, or at best, a couple percent improvements.

Yup. Not worth the 1-2% potential performance increase for me. My money would be much better spent on a better graphics card when it comes to gaming performance.
 

Dygaza

Member
Oct 16, 2015
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My point is that you shouldn't go out and upgrade memory speed so your CPU FPS can improve unless there is real benefits. As has been shown by many RAM tests over at Tom's Hardware, it rarely has any affect on gaming, or at best, a couple percent improvements.

Absolutely. In OP's case it's very clear that his biggest bottleneck is, and will be his GPU. So it would be foolish for him to upgrade anything else first. But I do believe that his next upgrade should be memory, as in DX12 era his cpu will be very strong for a long time, and he would get more benefits in getting everything out of that cpu, instead of looking for another cpu.

I quess my real point is that in DX12 era we will see a lot higher cpu scaling across all cores, which naturally means even more pressure on other subsystems like memory and pci-e. And if we go one step further, adding multi-adapter support in mix with igpu's and apus. We find that memory speeds are more than crucial for overall system performance.
 

TheELF

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Dec 22, 2012
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I quess my real point is that in DX12 era we will see a lot higher cpu scaling across all cores, which naturally means even more pressure on other subsystems like memory and pci-e. And if we go one step further, adding multi-adapter support in mix with igpu's and apus. We find that memory speeds are more than crucial for overall system performance.
Looking at what kind of FPS you get out of even the highest end cards(in ashes) this is pretty unlikely.
You have to keep in mind that this technology is based on 1.5Ghz athlon cores!!!
So yes, if you have cores that slow you will get very good scaling...everyone else,only in benchmarks.
 

therealnickdanger

Senior member
Oct 26, 2005
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Are these really fair comparisons? After all, I would expect a game designed around DX12 to perform poorly in DX11. Unless you can be certain that they are going out of their way to optimize across both APIs, how would you know?

I'm not jumping on this DX12 hype train until we see some better analysis across multiple releases of real games.
 

Mercennarius

Senior member
Oct 28, 2015
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Are these really fair comparisons? After all, I would expect a game designed around DX12 to perform poorly in DX11. Unless you can be certain that they are going out of their way to optimize across both APIs, how would you know?

I'm not jumping on this DX12 hype train until we see some better analysis across multiple releases of real games.

This is a fair assessment. Although if you look at what DX12 utilizes over DX11 it's not hard to see how it could offer significant performance improvements. This example and several others floating around seem to support that.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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This is a fair assessment. Although if you look at what DX12 utilizes over DX11 it's not hard to see how it could offer significant performance improvements. This example and several others floating around seem to support that.

Is "this example" based on AMDs DX11 to DX12 or NVidia DX11 to DX12? Or even Intel?
 

Mercennarius

Senior member
Oct 28, 2015
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Is "this example" based on AMDs DX11 to DX12 or NVidia DX11 to DX12? Or even Intel?

Good point. From AMD's examples floating around thus far, including this one, their results seem to support the advantages DX12 offers over DX11. It's still early, and GPUs from Intel and Nvidia may not have the same performance improvements.
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
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I love that there's a "Percent GPU bound" metric with DirectX12. That makes it really easy to figure out if you should upgrade your GPU or CPU. I hope more games do this.
 

TheELF

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Dec 22, 2012
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I'm not jumping on this DX12 hype train until we see some better analysis across multiple releases of real games.
You should though,and here is why,texture streaming while the GPU does other stuff,and in generall all of the gpu being utilized at once,basically console ports will no longer have crazy fps drops due to high/ultra textures (like in arkham knight) I doubt DX12 will do much in ways of FPS improvement but it will be much smoother, hopefully.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=H1L4iLIU9xU#t=941
And these will work with every and any gpu, nvidia/amd/intel, and these are features that are included in every console game, unlike the particular async compute that everybody talks about but only seems to be in 3 games,what's that, 1.5 games a year?

dx12 was'nt made for e-peen it was made to give better performance with less cpu power.
 

TheELF

Diamond Member
Dec 22, 2012
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I love that there's a "Percent GPU bound" metric with DirectX12. That makes it really easy to figure out if you should upgrade your GPU or CPU. I hope more games do this.

But it is only relevant to the benchmark that runs different code than the actual game,so it is pretty much useless(for the actual gamers) .
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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Good point. From AMD's examples floating around thus far, including this one, their results seem to support the advantages DX12 offers over DX11. It's still early, and GPUs from Intel and Nvidia may not have the same performance improvements.

Its very simple. AMD didn't bother to do any DX11 optimizations as you can see here:
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-10/...ashes-of-the-singularity-directx-11-1920-1080
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-10/...ashes-of-the-singularity-directx-12-1920-1080