Gadgetory

the recent arrival of Windows 10 meant big things for PC gamers as would finally enable DirectX 12 gaming following AMD's lead with mantle Microsoft aims to provide console level efficiency with closer to the metal access to hardware resources and reduce CPU and graphics driver overhead as was the case with mantle most of the DirectX 12 performance improvements are achieved through low-level programming which allows developers to use resources more efficiently and reduce single threaded cpu bottlenecking caused by abstraction through higher level api's this all sounds really exciting but up until now there hasn't been a Direct X 12 game available to test these theories out technically this still isn't at least not officially however start off has recently given those that pre-ordered ashes of the singularity on Steam early access to the game this is great news for game as a reviewers ally as it keeps us all a chance to check out an upcoming DirectX 12 title there's even an extremely detailed inbuilt benchmarking tool to boot some tech sites managed to get their hands on an even earlier build of the game a few months ago and they're finding sparked quite a lot of controversy the results showed that Nvidia Maxwell based GPUs were slightly slower under DirectX 12 while AMD is gcn enabled GPUs radically improved the truth is somewhere in the middle as I'm about to show invidious DirectX 12 performance isn't great in fact it's actually bad given better results can be hard under directx 11 but it's hardly disastrous md's DirectX 12 games are solid but they're nothing like the fifty to seventy percent gain some loud and proud AMD fans would have you believe that being said let's move on for some pre beta testing please note all benchmarks were recorded using a core i7 6 700k processor and the latest drivers from AMD and NVIDIA first let's look at the DirectX 11 performance at 1080p to establish a baseline things look mostly is expected although i'd say that the gap between the geforce and radiant graphics cards is slightly larger than normal keep in mind AMD doesn't perform as well at 1080p it does at high resolutions due to their driver overhead it's been said that AMD hasn't done much work to optimize their directx11 drivers for ashes of the singularity they're given what we're seeing here they are mostly they're the DirectX 12 results are far more competitive and while the gtx 980 TI is still able to lead the fury x it's just a single frame that separates them the 390 x is also very close to the 980 while the 390 is able to leave the 970 behind now we're going to compare the DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 results side-by-side as you can see in video drops to 23 frames per second under DirectX 12 which is troubling but not the end of the world on the other hand the Radian graphics cards pick up to 23 frames which is great news for AMD fans moving up to 40 and 40 p we see that directx11 performance on the AMD side does improve for example the 390 x is now slightly faster than the gtx 970 that we've normally expected to be quite a lot faster the DirectX 12 1440p testing is very similar to what we saw at 1080p with a minor decrease in frame rate performance that being the case the performance margins all remain much the same comparing the 1440p directx 11 and DirectX 12 performance side by side again shows that while Nvidia drops to 23 frames per second AMD is able to increase performance by single frame now at 4k using directx11 we again find that the 390 x is only able to match the 970 while the fury axe is only able to match the 980 and what is an unlikely scenario using DirectX 12 at 4k allowed the fury ax to perform within one frame per second of the 980 TI while the 390 X was just two frames per second slower than the 980 comparing the DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 results side-by-side we once again see the AMD makes a small step forward while in video takes a step backwards keep in mind all the GPU tests were conducted with a core i7 700k processor this means the DirectX 12 will provide better performance games over DirectX 11 with a slower processor as we're about to see using the Radeon r9 fury axe to measure CPU performance at 1080p using the crazy quality settings a few things become obvious firstly the Intel skylake processors don't benefit greatly from DirectX 12 with just one to two frames per second extra being rendered which is what we saw in most of the previous GPU tests using the core i7 6700 k the AMD processors however suffered massively when using DirectX 11 partly due to amd's driver overhead and sadly partly due to the fact that amd's processes just aren't that efficient however DirectX 12 sweeps into saved a for AMD or at least brighten it up a lot the fx-9590 enjoys over fifty percent performance gain to roughly match the intel core processors likewise the older phenom 2 x6 received a huge performance bump and so did the a-10 7870 k apu reducing the in-game quality settings to the medium preset with MSA turned off we see that the Intel skylake processors are cast at 61 frames per second in directx 11 however DirectX 12 affords quite a lot more Headroom allowing the 6700 k to reach eighty four frames per second with the GPU bottleneck remove the Intel processors raise away from the AMD processors even when using DirectX 12 running the same CPU test with the GeForce GTX 980 TI we find very different results particularly when looking at the AMD processors while the AMD processors were seen to be significantly slower using DirectX 11 with the fury axe this wasn't the case with the 980 TI where DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 performance was very comparable the AMD processors also performed better when using the medium quality settings with the 980 TI similarly we find there's very little difference between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 on the Intel processors when comparing performance with the 980 TI finally here we have the 980 TI in fury DirectX 12 performance side by side using the medium quality settings as you can see the margins are roughly the same which is great news for em directx 11 performance didn't look nearly as well balanced well that was really interesting and there's a heap of data to consider from what I would call a preview at best especially given the game is yet to enter the beta testing stage one of the first things we should discuss is why the Maxwell GPUs with for the most part slower with DirectX 12 I'll be it only a few frame slower the reason has to do with Maxwell's DirectX 12 support which is currently limited despite an video claiming otherwise it was discovered that the new asynchronous compute feature doesn't work correctly with Maxwell GPUs Maxwell doesn't provide hardware asynchronous compute support and is dead in video patch supporting at the driver level which comes at a performance cost as we've just seen AMD's cards on the other hand feature hardware-based asynchronous compute in the gcn architecture which can give them an advantage in directx 12 games as we also just saw so with maxwell nvidia have been more focused on directx 11 performance in to a certain extent this makes sense most of the games released while Maxwell remains current will only use directx11 giving them time to shift focus once DirectX 12 becomes more commonplace with AMD gearing their gcn architecture towards parallelisms they are better prepared for DirectX 12 so they've taken a hit and DirectX 11 titles the gcn architecture requires a CPU to feed it data and as we've seen this can create a CPU bottleneck as directx 11 kernel utilized 122 CPU cores for the graphics pipeline this also has to include things such as AI and physics this is why we saw the AMD process is really struggling in directx 11 when paired with the AMD Radeon r9 fury apps while they've fared much better with the GeForce GTX 980 TI that being the case it's also important to know which cpu is being used to GPU benchmarking and then which GPU has been used for CPU benchmarking when comparing directx 11 and DirectX 12 performance also games should be mindful that this is just a single DirectX 12 game it's unlikely to represent DirectX 12 performance as a whole as no small game is expected to do so as is the case with directx 11 gaming it's also very likely that some DirectX 12 games will favor AMD while others will favor in video still if the early access version of ashes of the singularity has shown us anything it's the AMD and NVIDIA are very competitive in directx 12 its graphics card such as the GTX 980 TI and fury ax worked with the one to two frames per second of each other as always we posted these graphs up in a forum hardware inbox calm for anyone that would like to take a closer look without relying on the pause button you're also welcome to ask any questions that you'd like there too thanks for joining me again for more videos like this one remember to hit like hit subscribe and I'll see you next time