NVidia to release DX12 optimized drivers [Videocardz]

[Carfax83]

NVIDIA’s Press Release:

Game Ready Driver Optimized for DX12

NVIDIA also revealed an upcoming Game Ready Driver optimized for DirectX 12 games. The company refined code in the driver and worked side by side with game developers to deliver performance increases of up to 16 percent on average across a variety of DirectX 12 games, such as Ashes of the Singularity, Gears of War 4, Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Tom Clancy’s The Division.(1)

Since the first launch of its Pascal™ architecture — the world’s most advanced DX12 GPU family, including the performance-leading GeForce GTX 1080 Ti® and GTX 1080 GPUs — NVIDIA has continuously improved DX12 game performance through releases of Game Ready drivers. The drivers are timed with the release of the latest games by leading partners.

Source

For all the flak NVidia has gotten about their DX12 performance on these forums, I thought I'd post this

This driver might turn out to be the DX12 version of the now mythical 337.xx driver which sent DX11 performance through the roof, and gave NVidia the edge in BF4 despite running on the DX11.1 path whilst AMD had the benefit of using Mantle, a low level API.

I'm sure the cynical among you will wonder why they haven't released this before, but I'm nearly certain it's due to the development time required. Some things just take a lot of time, ie the driver command lists for DX11 which took nearly two years to implement.

 

[Det0x]

Source

For all the flak NVidia has gotten about their DX12 performance on these forums, I thought I'd post this

So will you admit we have been right all along then ? Nvidia needed to fix their dx12 performance... If this driver really does so, remains to be seen

 

[tamz_msc]

This announcement is what you'd call the textbook example of an oxymoron. The whole point of DX12 is that the driver would factor in as minimally as possible in optimizing for performance, now NVIDIA wants that to happen via. the drivers?!

Oh and I don't remember AMD releasing DX12 optimized drivers, so what gives? Methinks this is tied to the Gameworks integration for DX12. So I have every right to be cynical.

 

[SlickR12345]

This announcement is what you'd call the textbook example of an oxymoron. The whole point of DX12 is that the driver would factor in as minimally as possible in optimizing for performance, now NVIDIA wants that to happen via. the drivers?!

Oh and I don't remember AMD releasing DX12 optimized drivers, so what gives? Methinks this is tied to the Gameworks integration for DX12. So I have every right to be cynical.

That is silly, without drivers the cards won't even work. Even though DX12 is low level, its still not direct level. There is still an overhead, just not as huge as DX11. Again we are not direct level API, that would be illogical as you would need to specifically code for hundreds of graphic cards, which no developer can do.

So, they have obviously worked with the game developers to improve the pathways, take advantage of maybe some not fully used channels, be able to more efficiently process the DX12 code.

But they need to increase it among other games as well, games like Sniper Elite, BF1, Total War and others!

Definitely a step in the right direction though. They've been getting pummeled so far in DX12. I foresaw something like this and went with a 1060 6gb on my second build. Architecturally the graphic card supports the most advanced DX12_1 feature set and is build to take advantage of DX12, so the fact that it was loosing performance left and right under DX12 was somewhat strange.

 

[tamz_msc]

I should have worded thing better: AMD did not feel the need to specifically announce a new driver release that gives better DX12 performance. Pascal isn't any different from Maxwell, and if NVIDIA already had extracted the most out of Maxwell with DX11, then what do they hope to achieve with DX12 from their present architecture?

 

[Samwell]

AMD had mantle. Their drivers were from the beginning pretty good optimized for DX12 because of the similarities of the two. We will see how much Nvidia can really achieve with this driver outside of marketing numbers and it will be interesting, whether this driver only helps this few games, so needs per game optimization or also helps other DX12 games. But there might be some headroom which needed a long time for developing. Drivers still matter a lot in DX12. Nixxes made a good presentation to DX12 at this years GDC :
https://www.techpowerup.com/231079/is-directx-12-worth-the-trouble

 

[tamz_msc]

Drivers would not matter as much they do today if someone drops support for DX11 pathways entirely and goes DX12 only.

 

[Samwell]

No, that's not true. Drivers still matter. You can ask every dev out there or just read the link i posted. Drivers are a bit less important in DX12 than in DX11, but they still have a big impact.

 

[Krteq]

Guys, have you read an article to the end?

(1) Figure averages the percentage increase of benchmark numbers in the following: GeForce GTX 1080 at 3840x2160 with launch driver 368.81 vs 378.74 on an Intel Core i7 5930K, 16GB DDR4 using Win10 x64. Ashes of the Singularity, Crazy Preset (46.5, 50.9 or 9%), Tom Clancy's The Division 1.6, Max Settings + 1x SMAA Ultra (31.5, 32.7 or 4%) Hitman, High Settings + High SSAO (50.6, 62.1 or 23%), Rise of the Tomb Raider, Very High + 2x SSAA (20.5, 27.2 or 33%), and Gears of War 4, Ultra Preset (41.2, 45.2 or 10%).

NVIDIA Announces GameWorks DX12

It's a summary of all previous improvements + new ones vs. launch driver

Anyway, it seems like it's for Paxwell cards only.

 

[tamz_msc]

No, that's not true. Drivers still matter. You can ask every dev out there or just read the link i posted. Drivers are a bit less important in DX12 than in DX11, but they still have a big impact.

That would be because there are no true DX12 titles today, meaning games whose engines are built from the ground-up with zero legacy support for DX11 and older APIs. The closest thing you have is AoTS.

@Krteq posted this in another thread on DX12, which I am going to paste here:

The reason why we don't see bigger performance boost in DX11->DX12 ports is that most engine code bases are designed around DX11 (DX9 roots). If you simply implement DX12 behind an existing graphics API wrapper, you will basically end up emulating the DX11 driver. That's not going to bring magical performance boosts. You need to completely rewrite your whole resource management pipeline, including data streaming, loading, memory management, dynamic resources, etc. You need to implement logic to group draws in bundles (and cache them) instead of submitting lots of tiny new draw calls every frame. You need to use ExecuteIndirect when drawing lots of bulk objects with similar state (such as shadow maps). And you need to use bindless resources to reduce draw call counts (bindless makes all resources are available without binding -> resource changes don't need draw call boundaries). None of the current DX12 PC games use bindless resources. The reason is that most engines are so tightly programmed around the old DX9/10/11 binding model. Changing that would require a major rewrite to the engine code base.

The biggest problem is: Major rewrite to support DX12 perfectly (bindless and all) would make the code base incompatible with the old DX9/DX11 binding and resource management model. Dropping DX11 support is not an option for most developers, as Windows 7 is still so widely used. Vulkan (supporting Windows 7) might be the black horse, allowing developers to move faster to these radically new rendering engine designs. As soon as we get fully featured robust HLSL -> SPIR-V compiler (it is bound to happen), there is nothing preventing studios in dropping the legacy DX11 support. That's when we see big changes. IMHO Microsoft made a big mistake when they decided to limit DX12 to Windows 10. Many developers would have already dropped DX11 (in favor of DX12) if DX12 supported Windows 7.

So as you can see from this, DX11 still relies on techniques like individual draw calls which are suitable for driver-level optimization only in the existing framework. When you want to extract maximum performance using DX12, that is by properly implementing the new features it offers, that would make it incompatible with DX11 and the current framework that AMD and NVIDIA have in place to assist developers in optimizing their code. Of course that doesn't mean that rewriting the drivers from scratch to incorporate these things in the drivers themselves cannot happen, except that would defeat the purpose of DX12 in the first place.

I expect that AMD, NVIDIA and the game developers would settle on a middle-ground, as true low-level control is difficult to achieve in the PC space, with all the variances in system configurations.

 

[Samwell]

No that's your pure interpretation which is unfortunately wrong. Sebbi mentiones a lot of important points why we will see "real" DX12 games later, when DX11 support is dropped, but this hasn't anything to do with drivers. As you even wrote the closest thing here is AOTS, but even in AOTS the driver matters a lot. Nvidia and i think also amd gained quite a bit with new drivers in AOTS.

I can't do more than post the presentation in which a DX12 developer writes that the driver still matters. If you don't believe him, who knows how to code DX12, then it makes no sense for me to discuss this topic more.

 

[tamz_msc]

No that's your pure interpretation which is unfortunately wrong. Sebbi mentiones a lot of important points why we will see "real" DX12 games later, when DX11 support is dropped, but this hasn't anything to do with drivers. As you even wrote the closest thing here is AOTS, but even in AOTS the driver matters a lot. Nvidia and i think also amd gained quite a bit with new drivers in AOTS.

I can't do more than post the presentation in which a DX12 developer writes that the driver still matters. If you don't believe him, who knows how to code DX12, then it makes no sense for me to discuss this topic more.

I've seen that presentation, and incidentally, Nixxes did not go DX12 only with the ports of Dues Ex:Mankind Divided and Rise of the Tomb Raider. The second sentence that Sebbi says in that post leads one to indirectly conclude why drivers are so important in DX11. The way he explained things makes it clear, at least to me, that drivers should play a much lesser role in a true DX12. Of course anybody is welcome to correct my views if it need be in the future.

It would be interesting to hear what Oxide would have to say, as they are the only ones who have the closest thing to a true DX12 game in Ashes of the Singularity.

 

[Carfax83]

So will you admit we have been right all along then ? Nvidia needed to fix their dx12 performance... If this driver really does so, remains to be seen 2

"Fix their DX12 performance" is the wrong term to use. We always knew that DX12 would be a work in progress, both on the developer's side and on the IHV side. DX11 has been at the forefront for so long (and it's not going away any time soon), that it's probably difficult to find a balance between tuning and optimizing drivers for DX11 and DX12, especially since NVidia spent so many resources on optimizing their drivers for DX11.

AMD's DX11 driver development was nowhere near as developed as NVidia's, plus like Samwell said they had Mantle, which undoubtedly helped them to get a leg up on DX12 driver development.

 

[Carfax83]

Guys, have you read an article to the end?


NVIDIA Announces GameWorks DX12

It's a summary of all previous improvements + new ones vs. launch driver

Anyway, it seems like it's for Paxwell cards only.

The article says "upcoming driver," so it hasn't been released yet. This is likely a new driver branch as we're already at 378.77 with the hotfix drivers.

 

[Carfax83]

It would be interesting to hear what Oxide would have to say, as they are the only ones who have the closest thing to a true DX12 game in Ashes of the Singularity.

I would rank Gears 4 as being the closest thing to a true DX12 game as it doesn't have a DX11 fallback path unlike most other DX12 games on the market.

*Edit* Saw Sebbi's post in that beyond3d thread, so I concede to Sebbi's superior knowledge on the matter.

The Nitrous engine is the closest thing we have to a true DX12 engine.

 

[Carfax83]

They've been getting pummeled so far in DX12. I foresaw something like this and went with a 1060 6gb on my second build. Architecturally the graphic card supports the most advanced DX12_1 feature set and is build to take advantage of DX12, so the fact that it was loosing performance left and right under DX12 was somewhat strange.

I think pummeled is overstating things a bit. NVidia even without these new DX12 optimized drivers is still very competitive with AMD in that area. Of course however there is always going to be room for improvement, and that goes for AMD as well. So while drivers still matter, game side optimizations matter even more and this is where AMD definitely has an advantage as the majority of multiplatform games are optimized for GCN hardware first and foremost courtesy of the consoles.

 

[Krteq]

The article says "upcoming driver," so it hasn't been released yet. This is likely a new driver branch as we're already at 378.77 with the hotfix drivers.

Well, they clearly said that improvements were measured against Pascal launch driver (368.81). nV already fixed some mess in DX12 driver and there already are some improvements in previous and current branches.

Don't expect miracles. Let's wait for some performance reviews

 

[tamz_msc]

I would rank Gears 4 as being the closest thing to a true DX12 game as it doesn't have a DX11 fallback path unlike most other DX12 games on the market.

It's still Unreal Engine. See Sebbi's comments in the Beyond3D forums that I linked in my earlier post.

 

[Carfax83]

Well, they clearly said that improvements were measured against Pascal launch driver (368.81). nV already fixed some mess in DX12 driver and there already are some improvements in previous and current branches.

Don't expect miracles. Let's wait for some performance reviews

Yeah definitely not expecting any miracles. This driver will not be as impactful as the 337.xx drivers were, since DX11 had a lot more room for driver optimizations presumably due to the higher CPU and driver overhead. It might be enough though to put NVidia over the edge.

I'm excited to see whether this driver increases performance from asynchronous compute.

It's still Unreal Engine. See Sebbi's comments in the Beyond3D forums that I linked in my earlier post.

Yeah I saw that post of his and I edited my comment to reflect it.

 

[Bacon1]

For all the flak NVidia has gotten about their DX12 performance on these forums, I thought I'd post this

This was posted days ago in the Nvidia subforum, not sure why you are reposting it here, but it is ironic as you were one of the people saying that Nvidia DX12 drivers were flawless and that it was all the developers fault.

First you claimed that Vulkan was broken on Nvidia hardware... until Nvidia released their Vulkan drivers.

So as far as I'm concerned, Vulkan is BROKEN on NVidia hardware at the moment.

Then you tried to claim that all DX12 performance issues were because of the developers and would never admit it could be drivers....

I wasn't impugning DX12, as I know the worth of a low level API. I'm just saying that the problem of developer incompetence/inexperience with DX12, and the lack of proper optimization on the engine side for the API affects BOTH vendors and not just NVidia. Games that are designed primarily for DX11 with DX12 tacked on, typically have very spotty performance.

The GTX 980 Ti already outperforms the Fury X in Gears of War 4, and as for Hitman, whatever is affecting Maxwell is likely on the engine side and not the API or drivers.

Yet here we are with Hitman performance being named as one of the ones improved by drivers. Seems like you owe all the developers an apology.

 

[tential]

So after all this time, Nvidia lackluster performance in dx12 is its own fault.

And even more funny on the other side now you can't say Nvidia drivers don't improve with time... See Nvidia can still get big gains from driver improvements after release just like amd..

 

[Carfax83]

This was posted days ago in the Nvidia subforum, not sure why you are reposting it here, but it is ironic as you were one of the people saying that Nvidia DX12 drivers were flawless and that it was all the developers fault.

First you claimed that Vulkan was broken on Nvidia hardware... until Nvidia released their Vulkan drivers.

You should have looked at the first page of that thread, where I clearly said:

NVidia's Vulkan driver isn't as advanced as AMD's is for starters, due to NVidia focusing mostly on DX12, and Vulkan utilizing a significant amount of the Mantle codebase

It wasn't difficult to deduce that there were some driver issues involved, as NVidia's Vulkan driver runtime libraries at the time was showing a significantly earlier version compared to AMD, which indicated that the driver just wasn't as developed.

Then you tried to claim that all DX12 performance issues were because of the developers and would never admit it could be drivers....

It's funny that in your zeal to prove me wrong, you're actually overlooking what I actually said; as usual. I never said anything about that it couldn't be drivers, I merely said that it's likely to be the on the engine side or the game's API programming.

Yet here we are with Hitman performance being named as one of the ones improved by drivers. Seems like you owe all the developers an apology.

Right, lets forget that even under DX11, AMD has always had a large lead over NVidia until Pascal. The Glacier engine used for Hitman has always favored GCN hardware to my knowledge, regardless of whatever API was used.

In this hardwarecanucks benchmark, the Fury X is showing a much larger than normal lead over the 980 Ti, and it even manages to beat the GTX 1070 reference model.

 

[LTC8K6]

But the Fury X has a min frame problem...

 

[Carfax83]

But the Fury X has a min frame problem...

In DX11 it does, but not in DX12. You can chock it up to their DX11 driver not being efficient enough to feed the shader array, a problem which disappears in DX12.

 

[Bacon1]

Welp the drivers are out and the performance gains are ... missing completely.

So far same exact performance as old drivers for everyone. Makes sense when you look at it saying "Game Release" and not an actual driver version. So they are including game updates in their "driver performance" patch.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/5yfren/geforce_37878_driver_released_with_optimizations/

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/5yfe3o/driver_37878_faqdiscussion_thread/

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-wildlands-game-ready-driver