PCPERDX12 GPU and CPU Performance Tested: Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark

[desprado]

There is a lot of negative writing on the wall for AMD. Long time fans are probably grasping at every possible straw they can to spin the negative news.

They're looking for a win. And if the first DX12 titles hit the scene and NV wins the benchmarks, I think they'll make their threads true and go console gaming. Haha.

lol........ they will blame Nvidia for AMD loss.

Infraction issued for trolling.
-- stahlhart

 

[littleg]

I must be missing something because I see Fury X tying with the mighty 980ti and the 390 beating the 970.

Maybe you guys have different graphs or something.

 

[Azix]

There is a lot of negative writing on the wall for AMD. Long time fans are probably grasping at every possible straw they can to spin the negative news.

They're looking for a win. And if the first DX12 titles hit the scene and NV wins the benchmarks, I think they'll make their threads true and go console gaming. Haha.

Would be very interesting to see. As it stands AMD should be gaining a significant performance boost beyond what we are seeing now. If nvidia exceeds that... cool

 

[IllogicalGlory]

So, can I assume NV money hatted Oxide? They saw 11% gain in 1080p medium settings with new build+driver update to AMD's 6%.

And AMD saw -3% in DX11 1080p medium.

Woof. AMD must not be happy that their competitor is seeing bigger gains in the game they are probably going broke in funding.

The GTX 970 in DX12 is still tying its performance in DX11; it wins at medium, loses at max. Not the most impressive results. Neither card gained much at the epic preset either. No change in the gap.

If you compare the results of the new bench to the first one, the results are nearly identical. I don't know where the old data in the new graphs came from, but it wasn't the data that people were talking about before.

No one using AMD is going to use DX11 in that game. Who cares if there was a minor drop?

 

[Goatsecks]

It feels like no one reading anything properly. Look at what silverforce posted.

 

[railven]

The GTX 970 in DX12 is still tying its performance in DX11; it wins at medium, loses at max. Not the most impressive results.

If you compare the results of the new bench to the first one. The results are nearly identical. I don't know where the old data in the new graphs came from, but it wasn't the data that people were talking about before.

No one is going to use DX11 in that game. Who cares if there was a minor drop?

Why would you say that? To dismiss the results? Or because you are 100% confident "no one is going to use DX11 in that game"?

Reviewers think DX11 matters enough to review it. /shrug

Here is a little story - I belong to a guild on FFXIV where some of the AMD users are using the DX9 client became for some reason the game crashes randomly using DX11 and specific AMD cards. (AMD is aware of this issue). Now, you still think people won't use a legacy API over a new API? Are you THAT confident?

As for the GTX 970 - clearly NV needs to figure out what they are doing. There performance has been a mess in these benchmarks.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

Why would you say that? To dismiss the results? Or because you are 100% confident "no one is going to use DX11 in that game"?

Reviewers think DX11 matters enough to review it. /shrug

DX11 matters as a comparison to DX12. That's why it's included. This is a test to measure the differences between DX11 and DX12, is it not?

No one, at least on AMD's side, where the gap is massive, is going to use DX11 in that game. I am 100% confident in that. NVDIA users might. We still don't know if cards like the 770 are faster in DX12 yet.

What these graphs don't mention is that there have actually been two Ashes of the Singularity drivers released between computerbase's first benchmark, both from AMD and NVIDIA. AMD pulled ahead in 15.8 vs 355.60, but the gap is back to where it originally was now, at least for the Fury and 980 Ti. To its credit, the 970 closed in on the 390 compared to the first benches.

Here is a little story - I belong to a guild on FFXIV where some of the AMD users are using the DX9 client became for some reason the game crashes randomly using DX11 and specific AMD cards. (AMD is aware of this issue). Now, you still think people won't use a legacy API over a new API? Are you THAT confident?

DX11 is basically unplayable on AMD, so there's little choice. I trust that AMD will make sure that DX12 is a good experience, considering how much they're pushing it. If it's not, there will be trouble, but I don't see switching to DX11 as an acceptable solution for that. I doubt something like FFXIV is much different in DX9 vs DX11. You don't need DX11 to make a good-looking, well-performing game. Just look at the Witcher 2.

 

[railven]

DX11 matters as a comparison to DX12. That's why it's included. This is a test to measure the differences between DX11 and DX12, is it not?

No one, at least on AMD's side, where the gap is massive, is going to use DX11 in that game. I am 100% confident in that. NVDIA users might. We still don't know if cards like the 770 are faster in DX12 yet.

So now you're assuming all AMD users will upgrade to Windows 10? I got a bunch of NV/AMD friends still not touching Windows 10 (free or not).

Guess AMD has no reason to fix their DX11 performance. I mean, no one is every going to use it.

What these graphs don't mention is that there have actually been two Ashes of the Singularity drivers released between computerbase's first benchmark, both from AMD and NVIDIA. AMD pulled ahead in 15.8 vs 355.60, but the gap is back to where it originally was now, at least for the Fury and 980 Ti. To its credit, the 970 closed in on the 390 compared to the first benches.DX11 is basically unplayable on AMD, so there's little choice. I trust that AMD will make sure that DX12 is a good experience, considering how much they're pushing it. If it's not, there will be trouble, but I don't see switching to DX11 as an acceptable solution for that. I doubt something like FFXIV is much different in DX9 vs DX11. You don't need DX11 to make a good-looking, well-performing game. Just look at the Witcher 2.

No kidding, AMD doesn't seem to care about DX11 for this particular game. They're essentially riding on the hopes every AMD user upgrades to Windows 10 and uses DX12. I hope in their case - they're right. Oxide support is gonna have some interesting corresponding when their suggestion is "have you upgraded to Windows 10?"

EDIT: As for FFXIV, they made a bunch of changes to the game exclusive to DX11 client. Them AMD users in my guild really don't like their situation. When you lose reflections, parallax mapping, CPU multi-threading, tessellated water...

That's how AMD loses piece of mind. Those users aren't recommending AMD cards to people in the guild.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

So now you're assuming all AMD users will upgrade to Windows 10? I got a bunch of NV/AMD friends still not touching Windows 10 (free or not).

Guess AMD has no reason to fix their DX11 performance. I mean, no one is every going to use it.

You can't expect to play the latest games without the latest version of DX. Was it not acceptable to create games without DX9/10 support? What about those Windows Vista users? No matter how much you love Vista/XP, if you want to game, you aren't using them. 10 is the same. People who don't want it will suffer the consequences.

No kidding, AMD doesn't seem to care about DX11 for this particular game. They're essentially riding on the hopes every AMD user upgrades to Windows 10 and uses DX12. I hope in their case - they're right. Oxide support is gonna have some interesting corresponding when their suggestion is "have you upgraded to Windows 10?"

It's just the draw calls. Check the original benches. AMD (excepting the Furies) did fine when the draw calls were low. There's nothing specific to this game that AMD is failing at; DX11 performance will be low in any game with this number of draw calls. DX12 is necessary if you want games with that many draw calls; this is true for NVIDIA as well. What will Oxide say when 980 Ti owners complain that their framerates match a 970's? You can argue for degrees all you want, but without DX12, both camps are going to have inferior performance in this game.

NVIDIA's driver team leaves issues alone that they're aware of as well. In Just Cause 2, an NVIDIA-sponsored game, with vendor-locked features, I got artifacts and broken decal effects on my 980 and my 670s. These are issues that NVIDIA is aware of, but they haven't been fixed. If NVIDIA users are forced to use DX11 because DX12 is broken, they'll be having a bad time too. It's possible for games/rendering paths to be broken with NVIDIA cards, too.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Star Swarm is a perfect example of something AMD doesn't want to optimize with DX11. And I dont see AOTS being any different. Same developer funny enough.

And its a fair approach. AMD doesn't have multithreaded DX11 drivers either. So why waste resources they dont have on something that is going out the door quickly and gives you an extra disadvantage.

AMD like any other company is looking deeply at the telemetric numbers they get from MS, Steam etc. And every time the Windows 10 share goes up they clap their hands while a few more people in the departments gets reshuffled.

Being a free upgrade still, its fair game to say: Performance issue? 7/8.1? Upgrade to 10.

~25% of all steam users are now on Windows 10 and still growing fast.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

Star Swarm is a perfect example of something AMD doesn't want to optimize with DX11. And I dont see AOTS being any different. Same developer funny enough.

And its a fair approach. AMD doesn't have multithreaded DX11 drivers either. So why waste resources they dont have on something that is going out the door quickly and gives you an extra disadvantage.

AMD like any other company is looking deeply at the telemetric numbers they get from MS, Steam etc. And every time the Windows 10 share goes up they clap their hands while a few more people in the departments gets reshuffled.

Being a free upgrade still, its fair game to say: Performance issue? 7/8.1? Upgrade to 10.

~25% of all steam users are now on Windows 10 and still growing fast.

You might want to reassess how rational the statement "AMD doesn't want to optimize with DX11" is ...

For the longest time the only thing AMD could optimize for were DX11 games so your opinion is misleading at best or disingenuous at the worst ...

Supporting multiple deferred contexts only aids you in creating multiple command lists however the command lists are still consumed in a single threaded fashion on the immediate context. Command lists are only useful in cases where there are less state changes however it is not a realistic in-game scenario to expect a lot of reuse since dynamic scenes with different objects will prevent that so a good implementation of a single thread driving the immediate context is never slower than supporting multiple deferred contexts ...

There is no practical benefit to supporting multiple deferred contexts and that is why AMD doesn't bother to implement it in their drivers ...

In cases like Star Swarm or AOTS having multiple deferred contexts does nothing when the compounding amount of state changes are the most expensive things ...

 

[bystander36]

You can't expect to play the latest games without the latest version of DX. Was it not acceptable to create games without DX9/10 support? What about those Windows Vista users? No matter how much you love Vista/XP, if you want to game, you aren't using them. 10 is the same. People who don't want it will suffer the consequences.It's just the draw calls. Check the original benches. AMD (excepting the Furies) did fine when the draw calls were low. There's nothing specific to this game that AMD is failing at; DX11 performance will be low in any game with this number of draw calls. DX12 is necessary if you want games with that many draw calls; this is true for NVIDIA as well. What will Oxide say when 980 Ti owners complain that their framerates match a 970's? You can argue for degrees all you want, but without DX12, both camps are going to have inferior performance in this game.

It took a few years after DX11 before DX9 was no longer supported. It takes time to get everyone on board.

And it is clear that AMD has choosen to not optimize for DX11 if the game supports Mantle on current games. At least at release. Given AMD cards aren't much different than their Nvidia counterparts, it is a good indication that on these games, where DX11 is way behind, they have choosen not to give much support for DX11.

AMD would be wise to give DX11 some love for at least a couple years into the DX12 era. Not everyone is going to switch to Windows 10 immediately.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

I don't think any amount of optimization will make Ashes playable for AMD. Their only option would be to support multithreaded draw calls, which has been a problem for a long time. Their solution is DX12, so I don't see them addressing that so late.

In a (mostly) non draw-call limited situation, NVIDIA's DX11 optimizations made that path faster than DX12:

Somewhere around 50 FPS seems to be the limit for AMD in that situation, while it's around 60 for NVIDIA. You see that 970 DX11 is not bottlenecked at all, and easily exceeds the DX12 path, but the same cannot be said for the 980 Ti, which benefits mildly from DX12. It seems the lack of DX12 optimizations are still preventing it from fully exceeding the 970. Both the Fury and 980 Ti are slowed down here because they are both lacking DX12 optimizations, which has been addressed by both camps from the last 2 drivers, but both benefit from increased draw call capacity.

Switch over to high draw calls:

Now the tables have turned for DX11 and 12. AMD maxes out around 20 FPS in DX11, with NVIDIA around 35. Despite DX11 970's dominance at normal draw calls, it now lags behind DX12 970, while the correct hierarchy is restored for Fiji and the 980 Ti vs 970/390.

There's a huge bottleneck in draw calls, both for AMD and NVIDIA that has nothing to do with DX11 driver optimizations.

 

[railven]

You can't expect to play the latest games without the latest version of DX. Was it not acceptable to create games without DX9/10 support? What about those Windows Vista users? No matter how much you love Vista/XP, if you want to game, you aren't using them. 10 is the same. People who don't want it will suffer the consequences.It's just the draw calls. Check the original benches. AMD (excepting the Furies) did fine when the draw calls were low. There's nothing specific to this game that AMD is failing at; DX11 performance will be low in any game with this number of draw calls. DX12 is necessary if you want games with that many draw calls; this is true for NVIDIA as well. What will Oxide say when 980 Ti owners complain that their framerates match a 970's? You can argue for degrees all you want, but without DX12, both camps are going to have inferior performance in this game.

Who is talking Vista/XP? Suffer the consequences? Haha. Did you see how good Battlefront performed on DX11?

So AMD is A-OK with funding a game that is going to get them demolished in DX11 on the HOPES that people looking at the benchmarks (whether you think people will use DX11 or not, reviewers will look at it) and realize "yes, I do want to upgrade my PC to Windows 10 FOR this game." I highly doubt this is the kind of game that will push people to Windows 10 JUST so their AMD card is actually competent.

NVIDIA's driver team leaves issues alone that they're aware of as well. In Just Cause 2, an NVIDIA-sponsored game, with vendor-locked features, I got artifacts and broken decal effects on my 980 and my 670s. These are issues that NVIDIA is aware of, but they haven't been fixed. If NVIDIA users are forced to use DX11 because DX12 is broken, they'll be having a bad time too. It's possible for games/rendering paths to be broken with NVIDIA cards, too.

How many users are actively playing Just Cause 2? Last I saw FFXIV has 2.5 million subs with 200-300K players daily. And it isn't just FFXIV. AMD seems to totally ignore the MMO crowd which is a huge audience.

We already seen AMD stop support on Mantle for their newer hardware. [Yes, I get it, DX12 is "right around the corner" so they don't have to focus on DX11 or Mantle anymore ] I can only imagine what DX12 is going to be like when new hardware comes out. Woof.

Pour a cold one for those poor bastards still trying to get proper DX11 from AMD.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

I wonder what 980 Ti owners on Windows 7 will say when they get beaten by Windows 10 users with 970s? I don't think they'll be bragging about NVIDIA's "proper" DX11.

 

[Keysplayr]

I wonder what 980 Ti owners on Windows 7 will say when they get beaten by Windows 10 users with 970s? I don't think they'll be bragging about NVIDIA's "proper" DX11.

Methinks you're reaching just a scooch now there partner.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

What is it with the sarcasm and condescension?

It's on the graph:

I'll concede that the benchmarks don't seem to be as poor a case as that test, but it highlights exactly what's going on here. AMD's DX11 support isn't sufficient in this game, and sometimes NVIDIA's isn't either.

 

[AtenRa]

1. AoTS will be released 12 months from now.

2. As of September 2015 almost 24% of Steam Gamers use Windows 10. By this time next year the vast majority will have transition to Windows 10.

3. Those on Win 7/8 will suffer and also those that are on Win 32 will also have to transition to 64bit because new DX-12 2016 games will only be 64bit.

 

[ShintaiDK]

What is it with the sarcasm and condescension?

It's on the graph:

I'll concede that the benchmarks don't seem to be as poor a case as that test, but it highlights exactly what's going on here. AMD's DX11 support isn't sufficient in this game, and sometimes NVIDIA's isn't either.

Your graph is pretty useless. You could for the matter just have posted the 3Dmark API test.

So lets return to reality.

 

[ShintaiDK]

1. AoTS will be released 12 months from now.

2. As of September 2015 almost 24% of Steam Gamers use Windows 10. By this time next year the vast majority will have transition to Windows 10.

3. Those on Win 7/8 will suffer and also those that are on Win 32 will also have to transition to 64bit because new DX-12 2016 games will only be 64bit.

Its all good and fun, until you need DX11 for backwards support. But that's a joker that will come into play in a couple of years.

Else I agree, no excuse not to demand people to use Windows 10, specially when its free.

 

[Piroko]

How many users are actively playing Just Cause 2? Last I saw FFXIV has 2.5 million subs with 200-300K players daily.

Multi-platform title. Also, connected accounts != individual players in MMOs.

And it isn't just FFXIV. AMD seems to totally ignore the MMO crowd which is a huge audience.

The MMOs that run on Unity/UE seem to run fine regardless of GPU manufacturer, those that use their own in-house engine have preferences though, yes.

We already seen AMD stop support on Mantle for their newer hardware. [Yes, I get it, DX12 is "right around the corner" so they don't have to focus on DX11 or Mantle anymore ] I can only imagine what DX12 is going to be like when new hardware comes out. Woof.

Pour a cold one for those poor bastards still trying to get proper DX11 from AMD.

1) So, are you implying DX12 is bad? Cause you sure seem to look for anything that might be a drawback.

2) Are current GPUs from either brand incapable of running current DX11 titles? Is there any reason to assume that DX11 performance of those games will change with the advent of DX12?

3) Is there any reason to assume that future hardware will show worse DX11 performance than current hardware?


This isn't meant to offend you. But after reading your posts in this thread, the first thing that came to my mind was: I've read exactly those arguments with DX10 vs. DX9. And yet, current GPUs will happily chew through those DX9 gen games that were used in arguments back then. No GPU manufacturer has lost it, no manufacturer has found the holy grail of performance. Pricing fixed all perceived differences.

 

[Keysplayr]

What is it with the sarcasm and condescension?

It's on the graph:

I'll concede that the benchmarks don't seem to be as poor a case as that test, but it highlights exactly what's going on here. AMD's DX11 support isn't sufficient in this game, and sometimes NVIDIA's isn't either.

Come on man, really? You mean you don't see a DX11 970 score beating a DX11 980Ti score? And you don't think anything is wrong there?
Come on now.

No sarcasm or condescension. I meant every word.

 

[tential]

1. AoTS will be released 12 months from now.

2. As of September 2015 almost 24% of Steam Gamers use Windows 10. By this time next year the vast majority will have transition to Windows 10.

3. Those on Win 7/8 will suffer and also those that are on Win 32 will also have to transition to 64bit because new DX-12 2016 games will only be 64bit.

12 months from now. Yet people want to draw sweeping dx 12 performance conclusions from a game that is a year away...

 

[3DVagabond]

12 months from now. Yet people want to draw sweeping dx 12 performance conclusions from a game that is a year away...

The best part is people who want to dismiss the DX12 performance, for the reasons you've sited, but want to drone on about the lack of DX11 optimizations from AMD as somehow indicative of AMD's overall DX11 performance. Then it being Alpha, a year away, not a real game, and whatever other excuses they use for nVidia's performance are not applicable for the DX11 pathway and drivers.

 

[railven]

Multi-platform title. Also, connected accounts != individual players in MMOs.

You can only log into one client at a given time. My point was there are currently more people playing FFXIV than Just Cause 2.

The MMOs that run on Unity/UE seem to run fine regardless of GPU manufacturer, those that use their own in-house engine have preferences though, yes.

You should dip into the Tera subforums. It isn't so peachy for AMD there either. Worse if you got an AMD CPU too. Woof.

1) So, are you implying DX12 is bad? Cause you sure seem to look for anything that might be a drawback.

Odd, I never said or implied that. Care to show me where I mentioned that? Or are you inferring that from me stating AMD is ignoring DX11 performance in this benchmark?

2) Are current GPUs from either brand incapable of running current DX11 titles? Is there any reason to assume that DX11 performance of those games will change with the advent of DX12?

Do you not see the huge performance drop in DX11 for this AMD sponsored game? They just showed us they can rekt it with the Battlefront numbers, in DX11. I can just assume AMD isn't going to touch DX11 until the end, which if that's their game plan, work it up!

3) Is there any reason to assume that future hardware will show worse DX11 performance than current hardware?

If DX12 is anything like Mantle, and it's going to require further tweaks to specific titles either via the devs or the GPU makers, there is a potential that yes future hardware might not be as optimized due these games no longer being current. But my crystal ball broke, can't say anything conclusively.

This isn't meant to offend you. But after reading your posts in this thread, the first thing that came to my mind was: I've read exactly those arguments with DX10 vs. DX9. And yet, current GPUs will happily chew through those DX9 gen games that were used in arguments back then. No GPU manufacturer has lost it, no manufacturer has found the holy grail of performance. Pricing fixed all perceived differences.

DX12 is a new animal. It's closer to the metal than PC gaming has ever been before. If the only other example is Mantle of what is probable, just look at how AMD basically ditched GCN1.2 hardware in Mantle optimizations, I mean:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review/12

The situation then is that in discussing the performance results of the R9 Fury X with Mantle, AMD has confirmed that while they are not outright dropping Mantle support, they have ceased all further Mantle optimization. Of particular note, the Mantle driver has not been optimized at all for GCN 1.2, which includes not just R9 Fury X, but R9 285, R9 380, and the Carrizo APU as well. Mantle titles will probably still work on these products – and for the record we can’t get Civilization: Beyond Earth to play nicely with the R9 285 via Mantle – but performance is another matter. Mantle is essentially deprecated at this point, and while AMD isn’t going out of their way to break backwards compatibility they aren’t going to put resources into helping it either. The experiment that is Mantle has come to an end.

With no need to tweak Mantle for their updated GCN family of cards, that advantage to the consumer is basically gone. Where Mantle gave an edge to certain configurations that edge erased if you used a card not supported by it's older GCN build.

If the future for the API is more dev driven, we might see optimizations go the way side once game devs move on to new projects and the GPU vendors move on to new uarchs. Though of course, no crystal ball, can only go by what is the only example - and it was AMD not bothering to update Mantle for their new cards, so hello DX11 again!