DX12 + nVidia...it's been 6 weeks

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

We've had the DX12 version of the game and the benchmark for 6 weeks now, and we are all well aware of the decreased performance on nVidia cards. So what is the progress on this situation? I'm not aware of anything coming from nVidia on addressing the issue, nor have we heard any word from Oxide on any changes with the engine. I've read a few articles with he said, she said and technical mumbojumbo. What I want to know is, will it get better without having to buy a new card? When? What's the plan?

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Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top


We've had the DX12 version of the game and the benchmark for 6 weeks now, and we are all well aware of the decreased performance on nVidia cards. So what is the progress on this situation? I'm not aware of anything coming from nVidia on addressing the issue, nor have we heard any word from Oxide on any changes with the engine. I've read a few articles with he said, she said and technical mumbojumbo. What I want to know is, will it get better without having to buy a new card? When? What's the plan?
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We have identified no problems in the D3D12 code path in our engine. Nvidia continues to have full source access and we will make any (reasonable) changes that they requested, but so far nothing significant has been changed on our side. We do expect continued improvements in everyone's D3D12 drivers going forward. Keep in mind that when DX11 first came out, it barely worked and there were many similar problems. D3D12 is progressing at a faster pace then D3D11 was. 

We believe we have identified a few specific places where some clever optimizations that the D3D11 drivers are making isn't happening (or can't happen) on D3D12, and we will do what we can to work around these issues as we find them.

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I appreciate the response.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Basically when you run a bench on DX11 with AMD graphic card it's obvious Drivers are consuming lots of cpu.

On the Opposite with a Nvidia graphic card, DX11 drivers are so well optimized that they do not introduce the same amount of cpu overhead as AMD drivers.

AMD has simply never been able to provide optimized DX11 drivers for their graphic cards while Nvidia is providing very well optimized drivers for DX11 and DX12.

This is why There's no improvement while moving from DX11 on DX12 with a Nvidia card.

I have 2 GFX cards (Nvidia & AMD). Basically My GTX770 outperforms my 290X on AOTS with DX11, while anyone would expect the opposite.

On DX12 my NVIDIA gfx card performs as well as on DX11. And my 290X Gives it's full potential in DX12 (outperforms GTX770 which is of course expected).

 

Do not expect any major improvement with current Nvidia cards on DX12, since anyway, Drivers are not putting a huge overhead, and this is for this specific reason that Mantle / DX12 have been introduced. They just Help AMD GFX cards to perform better. Nvidia is simply very good at optimizing drivers on DX11 / DX12.

Now my 2 cents that if Nvidia put a new GFX card on the market with an architecture specifically adapted to DX12, it's definitly going to outperforms AMD GFX cards.

Reply #4 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Such things should be said with the caveat that you need to have sufficient processing power to make the DX11 processing requirements inconsequential.  You can be CPU bound with a Geforce just fine, it's a little harder, but not that much harder once you factor in a CPU intensive game on top of it.  You'll get killed if you think you can maximize a 980 Ti on a 5 year old cpu in games with high load to begin with.