Game manufacturers say that N cards do not support DX12 asynchronous computing!

[PConline News] Since the official release of Windows 10, more and more users have upgraded through push notifications, and many users have naturally raised a question - does my graphics card support DX12? NVIDIA/AMD's response is that their recent generations of mainstream graphics cards support DX12 without any problems! But just yesterday, when developing the Benchmark of their own game, the foreign game developer Oxide Games was surprised to find that the performance of N cards in heterogeneous computing in the DX12 environment was very poor! Will this be an opportunity for AMD to officially turn around?

Heterogeneous computing becomes a turning point?

Now Oxide Games has come out to talk about the Benchmark test results, claiming that NVIDIA GPUs do not support DirectX 12 asynchronous compute/shaders, while AMD products do. AMD has been focusing on asynchronous shading and parallel computing for many years, ever since the advent of the AMD GCN architecture and the Radeon HD 7000 series products using the GCN architecture. The current new generation of game consoles also use the same technology, so they can bring unexpected graphics performance with lower resource overhead. As a result, AMD DirectX 12 performance is currently far ahead of NVIDIA, which has long focused on DirectX 11 performance and serial computing.

Is this the purpose of developing Mantle?

AMD has also devoted its efforts to developing its own API, Mantle. As early as 2012, it announced the launch of the Mantle API, which is close to the hardware bottom layer and supports the use of asynchronous computing, so AMD has successfully optimized its graphics cards for asynchronous computing. Since then, Microsoft has announced and launched DirectX 12, which effectively emulates many of Mantle's features, and AMD subsequently stopped developing the Mantle API. (Can it be said that DirectX 12 is the transformation of Mantle?)

The end result is that both DirectX 12 and the next-generation OpenGL API, Vulkan, benefit from the GCN architecture built into AMD GPUs, so in DirectX 12-compatible games that use asynchronous compute, we see huge performance improvements on AMD products, while NVIDIA products see almost no performance improvement.

NVIDIA really doesn’t know?

Regarding this issue, the representative of Oxide Games said: "As far as I know, Maxwell does not support asynchronous computing, at least not natively. We have disabled the asynchronous computing function in Benchmark at the request of NVIDIA, because if NVIDIA products try to turn on asynchronous computing, the Benchmark will run very slowly, so it is better to disable it."

It seems that NVIDIA is relying on Oxide Games to disable options or settings that are not favorable to NVIDIA in the DirectX 12 benchmark program. That being said, Oxide Games is impressed by the performance of NVIDIA's DirectX 11 product. Oxide Games said: "From our perspective, one of the surprising things about the test results is NVIDIA's excellent DX11 performance. However, we recently made improvements to the Benchmark, and the CPU performance has increased significantly compared to a month ago. Despite this, NVIDIA is still ahead in the CPU overhead of DX12, and we haven't even optimized the CPU overhead of DX12 like we did the DX11 version. Another surprising situation in the DX12 test is that the minimum frame rate of AMD R9 290X is higher than the minimum frame rate of GTX 980Ti."

It's hard to say whether asynchronous computing will be a decisive factor, but in some cases, it can improve GPU performance by 30%. Oxide Games said: "We use asynchronous computing, but it pales in comparison to the efforts of some console game developers in this regard. Most of their methods for optimizing GPUs have not yet come to the PC platform, but I have heard that developers use asynchronous computing to improve GPU performance by 30%."

Summary: While the detailed information of DX12 is still unclear, the statements of game manufacturers are very important. Are N cards really "congenitally disabled" in DX12? NVIDIA really needs to explain this! Will the advent of DX12 be a chance for AMD to turn things around? All this needs to wait for the test of time, and we will continue to pay attention to news and reports in this regard to bring you the latest information!

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.