Windows 10 has been out for a few months now and with it came a number of improvements that go far Microsoft's best Bone yet. All the same, ane of the operating system's biggest features has yet to be seen in activity. DirectX 12 is a key ingredient dedicated to PC gamers only the long wait is coming to an end.

Follow up commodity: DirectX 12 Multi-GPU Engineering Tested: GeForce and Radeon Paired Together

Following AMD'southward pb with Mantle, Microsoft aims to provide console-level efficiency with "closer to the metal" admission to hardware resources too equally reduced CPU and graphics driver overhead. Every bit was the case with Mantle, most of the DX12 performance improvements are achieved through low-level programming, which allows developers to utilize resources more than efficiently and reduce single-threaded CPU bottlenecking caused by abstraction through higher level APIs.

Finally, nosotros have what looks to be a very accurate ways of gauging DX12 performance to see just what it ways for the futurity of PC gaming. Recently Stardock provided gamers with Steam Early Access to Ashes of the Singularity, one of the first games to employ DX12. This new existent-time strategy game has been developed with Oxide'due south Nitrous engine and looks very much like Supreme Commander though the two games are in no way related.

Supreme Commander became pop for its large scale battles that weren't seen in other RTS games, though the mass of units oftentimes took its toll and gamers planning on large battles required the latest and greatest hardware, particularly on the CPU front.

As impressive as the Supreme Commander skirmishes were, Stardock doesn't believe they could be described as battles due to a limited number of units on the screen. Ashes of the Singularity takes things to the side by side level thanks to advancements in multi-cadre processors, depression-level APIs, 64-bit computing and the invention of a new type of 3D engine. The game could be described as a state of war across an entire world without brainchild. Thousands or even tens of thousands of individual actors can engage in dozens of battles simultaneously.

As mentioned, anyone can currently pre-order Ashes of the Singularity and proceeds early on access to the game. This affords us the opportunity to do some DX12 benchmarking, and as luck would take it, in that location is an remarkably detailed built-in benchmark to kicking. The benchmark was initially designed every bit a developer tool for internal testing and therefore does an excellent chore of reproducing the conditions gamers can expect to find when playing Ashes.

Earlier jumping to the testing methodology and then more than crucially the benchmark results, we're taking a moment to get upward to speed with everything that'due south gone on so far regarding Ashes of the Singularity'south DX12 performance since it was initially tested a few months ago…

Nvidia overstates DX12 back up

The latest Maxwell architecture is very efficient in DirectX 11 titles, and we take often found that compared to AMD's current generation cards, Nvidia generally comes out well on top of the operation per watt battle.

Nvidia's DX11 supporting architectures have been great at serial scheduling of workloads, in fact anything prior to Maxwell has been limited to serial scheduling rather than parallel scheduling. This makes sense though as DirectX eleven is suited for serial scheduling and this is why Nvidia has had an advantage.

However the opposite has been hinted when testing upcoming DX12 titles. Despite the fact that Maxwell based GPUs are being advertised as fully DirectX 12 compliant this might not exist entirely the instance. It was discovered that the new asynchronous compute characteristic doesn't work correctly with Maxwell GPUs, despite Nvidia advert the characteristic for the 900 series. Maxwell doesn't provide hardware asynchronous compute support and instead Nvidia patched in support for information technology at the driver level which comes at a performance cost.

AMD, on the other hand, offers hardware-based asynchronous compute in the GCN architecture, providing it an advantage in sure DirectX 12 benchmarks and games.

Maxwell'southward asynchronous engine tin can queue upwards 31 compute tasks and 1 graphic task. Compare that to AMD'south GCN 1.ane/1.two which has 8 asynchronous compute engines, each of which are able to queue eight compute tasks for a total of 64 coupled with i graphic task. Again, keep in mind that Maxwell queues in software while GCN ane.1/1.2 queues in the hardware.

Adding fuel to the fire Oxide claims that Nvidia pressured them non to include the asynchronous compute feature in their benchmark, removing the GeForce 900 series disadvantage from the equation when competing against AMD's DirectX 12 compliant GCN compages.

AMD's weak DX11 low-resolution performance

Years of DX11 benchmarking have shown us that 1080p and beneath resolutions tend to favor Nvidia GPUs. Just that's not actually what's happening. It's AMD who does poorly with GCN-enabled GPUs at lower resolutions. This is down to the fact that the GCN architecture is geared towards parallelism and requires the CPU to feed it data. This creates a CPU bottleneck as DX11 can utilize up to 2 CPU cores for the graphics pipeline and this besides includes things such every bit AI and physics.

This CPU bottleneck is the reason why we often see Intel's Core i3 processors challenging AMD's flagship FX-9590. The more than efficient dual-cadre Core i3 with Hyper-Threading is able to take on the more equipped FX as in theory the extra cores aren't beingness correctly utilized.

And that is why AMD started pushing the Mantle API back in 2022 every bit an culling to Direct3D and OpenGL. Mantle allows the AMD GPUs to be feed in parallel which agrees with their asynchronous compute engines which are designed to split complex workloads into smaller, easier to handle workloads.