Gadgetory

no do Vulcan benchmarks say no dx12 or volcano I see you guys followed in videos review guide to a team sad to see - tech tips benchmarking api's which is close to its end of life what about our X 480 Vulcan performance fine let's talk about the new API is DirectX 12 and Vulcan how they work how they perform what they mean for the future everything freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized save time and get paid faster click now to try for free now what is an API or application programming interface in layman's terms it's a facilitator it handles requests similarly to a waiter at a restaurant taking orders you can think of the customer as system a system a wants to access some functionality or information that system B which we'll call the kitchen controls now system B doesn't want to just let system a directly access all of its information there are security and liability issues here but not only that having all these different customers trying to talk to the cook directly unless timed near perfectly has the potential to be more confusing than helpful enter the waiter or in this analogy the API the waiter can serve the customer with a menu of subroutine definitions protocols and tools that the customer can use to achieve his task the customer then sends that request through the waiter to the kitchen where system B will act out those instructions and then send a response back to system a through the API clean simple and delicious theoretically this is how it works but they can be more bloated and therefore slow have you ever been to a restaurant that has like four different menus one for just all the different kinds of freaking water with many pages containing a multitude of items which are essentially the same damn thing then you can relate to the frustration of not being able to find what you're looking for at all do you ever just want to throw the damn menus all in the air stomp over the kitchen and scream can you just render me a chicken burger and some yam fries is that too much to ask ok let's come back to that later first what are they used for lots of things api's can be used for web based systems operating systems databases software libraries or in this case computer hardware but as important and ubiquitous as they are they're not something the average user will ever interface with so why do we suddenly care so much about DirectX 12 and Elkin as selling points for games and video cards well hype machine aside DirectX 11 and OpenGL the predecessors to the shiny new graphics api's are rather bureaucratic like the complicated menu analogy but worse because there are even more degrees of abstraction there are many systems and devices talking to each other at a time passing instructions around with many of them being redundant or outdated it's just not as efficient and there are other problems for instance one of your processor cores carries the burden of managing the vast majority of all of the critical time sensitive tasks one of the main ways that the new graphics api's are more efficient is that they can use previously untapped hardware resources multi-core CPUs are a great example here look at this relatively realistic hypothetical scenario given to us by AMD thanks guys they show that OpenGL stacked all of the work of presenting to the user and processing the OpenGL driver on to core 1 along with a large portion of processing the OpenGL runtime and the largest portion of game code processing this leaves little for course 2 to 4 to work on almost nothing 4 5 & 6 to work on and literally nothing for 7 & 8 and for your reference DirectX 11 works in a very similar manner now let's look at Vulcan though this is generally applicable to both of the new generation api's one of your processing cores is still responsible for a bigger part of the work than any of the others but overall utilization is noticeably higher even all the way down to core 8 now this is a hypothetical example so I'm not going to spend time analyzing the exact improvements to the millisecond but in a nutshell Vulcan the DirectX 12 do a much better job overall of sharing the load across all cores another key objective is to shed old layers of unneeded abstraction they've done this by simplifying protocol routes minimizing graphical driver overhead focusing heavily on preventing time heavy draw calls sent linearly to a single core of the CPU instead of parallelizing draw call packages in order to ease up on CPU and let the GPU function as it should kind of like multiple waiters attending to the needs of each diner at a table instead of having one waiter with many plates on his arm dropping them off one at a time another key is that game developers can talk more directly to the GPU Hardware this is what is meant by the term lower-level api think of it like having a manual transmission in a car instead of an automatic but to all the gear heads out there watching this don't just assume that all your DirectX 11 OpenGL games are outdated junk at this point bear in mind that poor operation of a manual transmission can be worse than an automatic or simply not better just because a game has Vulcan or DirectX 12 support doesn't mean that efficiency and performance automatically improve and this is true especially for games that were released with it early on though of course there are a few exceptions for the best results the new AP is need to be part of the core design of not only the game itself but the underlying engine as well and you do the math it can take easily two three or even more years to make a good triple a title and these api's haven't even been available for that long meaning the implementation of these api's was likely added to tick a marketing check box appease a longtime partner or hopefully and very likely just to gain the valuable experience that you can only get by working directly on them but when more true DirectX 12 and Vulcan titles drop this level of control for developers has the potential to be awesome but a little scary too because we're putting a lot of responsibility on the game and more specifically the game engine developers and this is a major shift so I just spent like four minutes telling you how interesting and important the new AP eyes are in reality the truly interesting component of the equation is going to be the new game engines that arise because of the freedoms afforded to them by the AP is not necessarily the api's themselves and from game engine creators who care the John Carmack's and Tim Sweeney's of the world you'll get amazing new features unlocked by this additional performance and flexibility but back to the scary bit from before we're also putting this greater degree of control and the responsibility that comes with it in the hands of gaming companies who tell us things like 30 FPS is a good thing or that implement game physics effects that are reliant on the framerate that hasn't been a thing since like Intel 46 and I was arguable back then that's inexcusable trash back to the API is though since that's what we're really here for so far we focus on similarities but how do dx12 and Vulcan differ from each other let's start with DirectX 12 a big focus for Microsoft this time around has been the introduction of their new Lda and MDA modes for multiple graphics cards for a rundown on how those work check out this video on WTF is going on with SLI along with this Microsoft's vision to allow developers to support a mixture of graphics card models and even brands so the user can get as much power as possible out of their available hardware think of this more in terms of using your onboard graphics to get a little bit more oomph than a compelling reason to build this monstrosity one of the ways this could work is split frame rendering or SFR this is when a portion of the screen is rendered by one GPU and the rest is rendered by a second but we'll have to wait and see how well this performs in the real world so that's cool but being a Microsoft product DirectX 12 will only function on Windows 10 and Xbox so Linux OSX Android enthusiasts and actually even people who are still in Windows 7 and Windows 8 are left out in the cold which brings us to Vulcan Vulcan brought to us by the Khronos group is the primary successor to OpenGL and is proudly cross-platform working on everything we just mentioned and more this is a huge deal for steam OS in particular and Linux in general because it should bring with it a stronger support for a wider range of titles something Linux has struggled with ever since well ever so Vulcan is a big deal has been using it as an droids low-level API since 2015 and Dan Ginsburg from valve has talked about it on stage and said that Vulcan is the future although that's not surprising considering directx12 doesn't work on steamos and valve Microsoft relationship this has been getting a little tense lately moving on there was one last thing that they had in common asynchronous compute now this has been a highly controversial subject making it unfortunately outside the scope of this video but if you guys want to see a similar video dedicated to it let me know in the comments down below in a nutshell though it allows additional lightweight work to run in parallel alongside the main graphics thread so specific lighting technique or post process anti-aliasing method like TSS AAA now this dynamic scheduling introduces some challenges for Nvidia and AMD that did not exist in a more static ecosystem but that's for them to worry about and for me to maybe cover in another video that being said it does seem that AMD has been pushing harder than Nvidia and it shows performance wise as AMD is currently seeing more of a benefit than Nvidia in the 3d mark time spy benchmark which allows you to switch asynchronous on or off when reviewing the numbers for these api's you'll notice that they're kind of all over the place looking at rise of the Tomb Raider a Direct X game we can see that while it does make a significant improvement at 1080p once you step up a bit to 1440p or even 4k things seem to fall apart a little bit and DirectX 11 actually pull the head hit men on the other hand did not share this funky scaling pattern and seemed to improve when using DirectX 12 or at the very least stay the same across all the graphics cards I tested it with which should represent GP 104 with the GTX 1080 GP 106 with the gtx 1066 gigabyte edition for the nvidia side and the power of AMD's new polaris architecture with the RX 480 moving on to ashes of the singularity this game is like half benchmark half game so it shows the biggest improvement by far when using DirectX 12 instead of directing and for the Vulcan fans out there I've heard there will be a patch coming for you as well one great additional piece of insight that ashes displays at the end of their benchmark is CPU frames versus GPU frames what this essentially means is how many frames your CPU could potentially push compared to what your GPU actually pushed so if the CPU number is higher you could get more overall FPS with a graphics card upgrade notice that when we run the more CPU focused version of the benchmark the numbers are at par because now you're intentionally CPU bottlenecked moving on to Vulcan Doom numbers for the Nvidia side are just a mess for the GTX ten eighty Vulcan was similar to Tomb Raider worse at 4k than opengl 4.5 dropping down to 1080p however and it's a whole different story with massive improvements shown the arcs variety does show the performance trend that we would expect improving considerably when running the Vulcan API and utilizing asynchronous compute shaders good so the features sound pretty great the performance depending on your configuration is probably good but it might not be great what about supported games on the DirectX 12 side of things the list seems rather populated and there is a fair number of titles on the way that are claiming they will support it but this doesn't mean that DirectX 12 integration hasn't been riddled with issues quantum break was a mess tomb Raider's back-end barely even functioned for a while to the point where they added a warning if you enable it and the upcoming Deus Ex mankind divided which I think is out now it was supposed to launch with support for it and that's been pulled for a while so they can fix it up and Vulcan side of things is rough too their support list has four items on it one of which is upcoming one of which is dota freaking 2 not sure about you but I sure needed more FPS in dota on my DirectX 12 capable hardware another is the rather wonderful single-player game from 2014 possibly not that many current players unfortunately and then lastly we have doom a beautiful-looking game with proper built-in support and asynchronous compute capabilities cool but that's singular so there you go in conclusion the future is bright with physics and AI heavy games being among the most exciting things we have to look forward to which is awesome but the present is more a light at the end of the tunnel situation get excited for new game engines that support these api's and be on the lookout for awesome new game engine technology that will likely arise from the improvements made here this may finally signal the return of our old cores for gaming episodes maybe we'll finally have an episode that doesn't end in four cores is the best because by that time you're $1700 ten core Extreme Edition will finally matter maybe today we're highlighting the k7 xx limited edition ruby-red headphones of course from Mass drop they also have a bunch of other cool things that you can buy like with other people so that the price goes down and if more people buy it the price goes down further to a logical minimum and it's it's really cool we should check out mass drop regardless the products were showcasing today is the same spec wise as the k7 xx headphones the lines reviewed and you guys all liked some time last year you can check that video out here or all over my it's going to be the real difference however is that this run uses red accents on the ear cups and headband remember that this is a limited drop so if you want a pair you're going to have to act relatively fast these headphones were configured by mass drop and manufactured by AKG just to note for international orders if you're outside of the US there's a $25 shipping and handling fee put on top and that's it check out mass drop thanks for watching guys if this video sucked oh but if you liked it you know what to do hit the like button get subscribed do all that kind of stuff check the link of video description down below where you can buy like GPUs or something I guess we talked about those in this video also check out the length of video description down below to buy a shirt and go to the forum to talk about everything I said in this video there's might be something wrong full lay the crap out of me for that and then I'll learn and that'll be good but oh man anyways watch this video which is about wTF is going with us alive because we're making a series of these now although continuing to do these might kill me so I don't know