DX12 Testing - AMD vs Nvidia (290x vs 980TI)

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/directx-12-tested-an-early-win-for-amd-and-disappointment-for-nvidia/

The numbers are incredible!

Why are AMD cards seeing a larger increase?

Go away.

Did AMD manage to pull off some sort of crazy-optimised driver coup? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely. It's well known that Nvidia has more software development resources at its disposal, and while AMD's work with Mantle and Vulkan will have helped, it's more likely that AMD has the underlying changes behind DX12 to thank. Since the 600-series of GPUs in 2012, Nvidia has been at the top of the GPU performance pile, mostly in games that use DX10 or 11. DX11 is an API that requires a lot of optimisation at the driver level, and clearly Nvidia's work in doing so has paid off over the past few years. Even now, with the Ashes benchmark, you can see just how good its DX11 driver is.

Optimising for DX12 is a trickier beast. It gives developers far more control over how its resources are used and allocated, which may have rendered much of Nvidia's work in DX11 obsolete. Or perhaps this really is the result of earlier hardware decisions, with Nvidia choosing to optimise for DX11 with a focus on serial scheduling and pre-empting as AMD looks to the future with massively parallel processing.

It's not just a larger increase ... it's an incredibly huge increase for AMD and pretty much no increase at all for Nvidia ... at least in this test. Op didn't post the heavy scenes and 99th percentile graphs, those results are even more impressive for AMD. A lot of people have been predicting for a while that AMD would benefit mightily from DX12 and whoa, that appears to be coming true big-time.

I'm not trying to put on a tin foil hat and be a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if AMD got the jump on DX12 due to working closely with MS with the XB1 and such?

Here's another article comparing this game running on Nvidia and AMD cards. Again the benchmarks have Nvidia killing in the DX11 comparisons but AMD pulling even in the DX12 comparisons. And the author offers some opinions as to why this might be the case.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/212314-directx-12-arrives-at-last-with-ashes-of-the-singularity-amd-and-nvidia-go-head-to-head

Surprised to see dx12 being worse than dx11 for nvidia.

Okay...what's going on? Nvidia haven't optimize their latest card with Directx 12 yet or...?

I think it's probably more a case that DX12 makes software optimization from the hardware manufacturer less relevant. Nvidia has been totally spanking AMD because their drivers are better, because they work with game developers more closely, etc. DX12 makes it more about the physical product and Nvidia has never had the same kind of edge over AMD in that department as they've had with the code that runs it.

Suddenly feeling less good about my 970 lasting longer than most cards due to DX12. Hope they manage to improve things with drivers over time, really surprising to see a decrease in performance after all this talk about performance gains from DX12.

the sad thing with all what amd tries . the share market will kill them , nvida has better marketing better relationships with developers .

don't fret, There is not a single game out that is DX12 ready, and Nvidia will release a mature driver set when there is a reason too.

If there were actual DX12 games available, I would be worried. I am sure Nvidia will get their shit together in time for the games.

Suddenly my 290 turned from water to wine, thanks AMD. Holy fook if true...

Okie, it seems I posted AMD's and Nvidia's opinion about this in the wrong thread:

We talked with NVIDIA and AMD about the benchmark and both noted that this is alpha software and we took that as they felt it might not be an accurate measurement of DX12 at this point in time.

As they said, this is just a single benchmark of a single unfinished game.

And I believe that they didn't even work with other hardware parts apart from AMD GPUs.

Not even AMD CPUs LOL!:

Is there anyone here who believes that in a completed DX12 game a core i3 will be 10-15%!!! faster than FX8370?

Lol as if performance in some single random game really matters.

You can be like the media....paint a one sided story.

I could post results of the difference of GTX 570s in SLI vs GTX 980Ti AMP! Omega for Borderlands 2 on 5760x1080....it's only a 45% increase in performance. I could claim the jump to the 980Ti isn't really worth it.

Then again. I could say the performance jump of almost 300% on Far Cry 3 when using the 980Ti over the 570s in SLI on 5760x1080 is clearly worth the upgrade.

I have the power to sway people one way or the other, based on only the information I release on 1 game. We need to see what actual true DX12 performance across multiple games and benchmarks are before we can say AMD or Nvidia is better.

Looks impressive. Even better the fact the R9 290X cost's $300 buck while the 980 Ti cost's over double that.

I would like to look at more DX 12 benchmarks.

I remember reading somewhere that when they designed GCN, it was intended to be designed to work with "close to the metal" API's, hence AMD coming up with Mantle. If this hold's true then AMD should do well in DX 12.

Are you guys really taking the performance of one unfinished game as the standard for nvidia's dx12 performance?

I hope AMD do better than green team in DX12 , and thier Zen project works . cause if not we gonna see this good company leave the market ....

A local market owner told me , intel paying not to buy from him but not to sell AMD parts ..... I dont know if thats true or not , but with nivida marketing and intel performance , AMD is going down .

No one will do better than the other in DX12, it will come to the hardware's abilities once all the drivers are in place and matured. AMD's older gpu's dont fully support all DX12 features. And the same goes to Nvidia's non Maxwell 2.0 gpu's as well. However AMD's newer GCN models, 260, 7790, 285, 290's does support the DX12_0 feature set but not 12_1.

So the fact that a unfinished game showing Nvidia's DX11 performance is better than DX12, and that i3's performing better than FX6300 or FX 8350 means that this benchmark is flawed and shows no real proof about AMD's superiority.

I know Intel has done those things in the past, offering major discounts, bribing OEM manufactures, and retailers to snuff out AMD sales. But not too long ago Intel got fined big time for those practices.

What? As part of the deal back in 2009 where intel settled out of court, intel "promised" that they will not do those kinds of things. Looks like they were lying. As the saying goes once a cheater always a cheater. That partially would explain why you can't find that many Carrizo based laptop as someone pointed out, intel is probably doing shady stuff on the background to minimize the sales of Carrizo based laptops.

It seems like AMD can't do much despite having better tech like with Carrizo, which absolutely trashes intel Core i7 processors.

It seems like AMD needs to gather more proof and launch another anti-trust lawsuit. This time going all they way instead of settling out of court. Someone needs to punish intel badly. Sadly, I don't see that ever happening.

No, but it still is curious to see. Besides, likely bad optimisation for AMD will cancel out the difference :P

I said this before and i will say this again. Amd's GCN architecture is more future proof . Just look at benchmark with Amd's 78xx and 79xx series and compare them to nvidias Kepler series. AMD held up much better ( for example nvidia gtx 660 which launched to be competitive to 7870 nowdays is closer to 7850 instead and in fact some games 7850 is slightly faster )

Nothing to the rumours about nVidia crippling the performance of the Kepler cards to have people upgrade?

There is one thing you need to be aware of to get an idea why this is a very big win for AMD.

While AMD is a slightly larger company than Nvidia, Nvidia are much more focused in their production since AMD competes in more markets, markedly the CPU segment, where they are competing against Intel, a much, much larger company (10 times more revenue).

This means that in the graphic card segment AMD has less resource available than Nvidia, and have a hard time giving the same amount of external support for game developers as well as individual driver optimization. In this, DirectX 11 clearly supports the company with most available resource (Nvidia), since it requires vast amounts of resource to optimize individual games.

DirectX 12 on the other hand gives this control back to the developer, giving them more control over the allocation of resource. This in turn means that hardware will be a stronger driving force of computer graphics in the future. Since AMD have a weak point in their ability to produce individual drivers and spare manpower for direct support of game developers (due to lower resource available), the outcome of directX 12, which empowers developers and in part removes the need for individual driver optimization, works strongly in their favor.

In any event this is good for the community since it progresses development and competition! :)