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Details On NVIDIA's Vulkan Driver, Sounds Like It Will Be A Same-Day Release

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  • #31
    Originally posted by xeekei View Post

    I think those results is more due to AMD having a lousy DX11 implementation, and Nvidia a good one. And with DX12 the raw power of the GPUs gets released and not held back by the big inefficient driver. I could be wrong though, anyone's guess is as good as mine.
    I agree that amd apparently has a poor dx11 implementation but the results swing rather significantly and nvidia, iirc, actually regress a bit relative to their dx11 paths.
    I don't think this changes my point and look at the difference in support for compute queues between the two vendors.

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    • #32
      The current speculation is that AMD went for a more parallel GPU approach than NVidia, which helps them now on DX12, but they have to use more of the CPU on DX11 to get the same performance.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by xeekei View Post
        If AMD don't release their Vulkan driver on day one too, I'd be disappointed.
        Actually more surprised than disappointed.

        As others have said Vulkan is basically Mantle with more input from other parties.
        I've heard/read that on the API level it is often the same functions just with a different prefix.

        AMD releasing Vulkan drivers after the other vendors would be ironic.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by liam View Post
          That's nice. It appears there might be some reason to think that gcn is a better fit for these next generation apis, however.

          extremetech.com/gaming/213202-ashes-dev-dishes-in-dx12-amd-vs-nvidia-and-asynchronous-compute

          Keep in mind that:

          1.) Oxide seems to be the only game dev studio that hypes Async compute to no end.
          2.) Their website has a big AMD logo on it. www.ashesofthesingularity.com
          3.) When they released their Star Swarm Benchmark for Mantle to show how great AMDs Mantle is NVIDIA released a driver update for their DX11 driver that even beat AMD cards with Mantle in this benchmark. http://wccftech.com/nvidias-directx-...api-benchmark/

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          • #35
            Originally posted by blackout23 View Post


            Keep in mind that:

            1.) Oxide seems to be the only game dev studio that hypes Async compute to no end.
            2.) Their website has a big AMD logo on it. www.ashesofthesingularity.com
            3.) When they released their Star Swarm Benchmark for Mantle to show how great AMDs Mantle is NVIDIA released a driver update for their DX11 driver that even beat AMD cards with Mantle in this benchmark. http://wccftech.com/nvidias-directx-...api-benchmark/
            Relax. Nvidia said it is an alpha benchmark that has limited usefulness and still has bugs, like with their MSAA implementation. And Nvidia should obviously know better...

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            • #36
              AMD is not very PR savvy company regarding drivers - they don't usually per-announce anything, do they? At least I can't remember. So I suspect they have Vulkan driver ready, they just don't talk about it, as Vulkan is not published yet.

              If that day comes and goes and they haven't released anything, then we will start to worry.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by xeekei View Post

                I think those results is more due to AMD having a lousy DX11 implementation, and Nvidia a good one. And with DX12 the raw power of the GPUs gets released and not held back by the big inefficient driver. I could be wrong though, anyone's guess is as good as mine.
                Yeah, I think I agree with you. In order for AMD to compete they've been releasing very capable hardware. With OpenGL performance being much lower than the hardwares potential it seems obvious there will be a big difference between it and Vulkan.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by log0 View Post

                  Relax. Nvidia said it is an alpha benchmark that has limited usefulness and still has bugs, like with their MSAA implementation. And Nvidia should obviously know better...
                  I believe Oxide Game has confirmed that it is not a bug.

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                  • #39
                    BTW. Seems like people here have great loves for AMD!

                    Sarcasm aside, I think AMD would be one who happy with the 'close to metal' api as they have less resources on the software side (than the other players). Let's just wait and see when the driver would be released from them. Probably not too far away after the api's relese. They are pretty much silent regarding Vulkan, btw.

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                    • #40
                      One of the Oxide devs wrote a forum post about Ashes of the Singularity which I shall paste below

                      Wow, there are lots of posts here, so I'll only respond to the last one. The interest in this subject is higher then we thought. The primary evolution of the benchmark is for our own internal testing, so it's pretty important that it be representative of the gameplay. To keep things clean, I'm not going to make very many comments on the concept of bias and fairness, as it can completely go down a rat hole.

                      Certainly I could see how one might see that we are working closer with one hardware vendor then the other, but the numbers don't really bare that out. Since we've started, I think we've had about 3 site visits from NVidia, 3 from AMD, and 2 from Intel ( and 0 from Microsoft, but they never come visit anyone ;(). Nvidia was actually a far more active collaborator over the summer then AMD was, If you judged from email traffic and code-checkins, you'd draw the conclusion we were working closer with Nvidia rather than AMD As you've pointed out, there does exist a marketing agreement between Stardock (our publisher) for Ashes with AMD. But this is typical of almost every major PC game I've ever worked on (Civ 5 had a marketing agreement with NVidia, for example). Without getting into the specifics, I believe the primary goal of AMD is to promote D3D12 titles as they have also lined up a few other D3D12 games.

                      If you use this metric, however, given Nvidia's promotions with Unreal (and integration with Gameworks) you'd have to say that every Unreal game is biased, not to mention virtually every game that's commonly used as a benchmark since most of them have a promotion agreement with someone. Certainly, one might argue that Unreal being an engine with many titles should give it particular weight, and I wouldn't disagree. However, Ashes is not the only game being developed with Nitrous. It is also being used in several additional titles right now, the only announced one being the Star Control reboot. (Which I am super excited about! But that's a completely other topic ).

                      Personally, I think one could just as easily make the claim that we were biased toward Nvidia as the only 'vendor' specific code is for Nvidia where we had to shutdown async compute. By vendor specific, I mean a case where we look at the Vendor ID and make changes to our rendering path. Curiously, their driver reported this feature was functional but attempting to use it was an unmitigated disaster in terms of performance and conformance so we shut it down on their hardware. As far as I know, Maxwell doesn't really have Async Compute so I don't know why their driver was trying to expose that. The only other thing that is different between them is that Nvidia does fall into Tier 2 class binding hardware instead of Tier 3 like AMD which requires a little bit more CPU overhead in D3D12, but I don't think it ended up being very significant. This isn't a vendor specific path, as it's responding to capabilities the driver reports.

                      From our perspective, one of the surprising things about the results is just how good Nvidia's DX11 perf is. But that's a very recent development, with huge CPU perf improvements over the last month. Still, DX12 CPU overhead is still far far better on Nvidia, and we haven't even tuned it as much as DX11. The other surprise is that of the min frame times having the 290X beat out the 980 Ti (as reported on Ars Techinica). Unlike DX11, minimum frame times are mostly an application controlled feature so I was expecting it to be close to identical. This would appear to be GPU side variance, rather then software variance. We'll have to dig into this one.

                      I suspect that one thing that is helping AMD on GPU performance is D3D12 exposes Async Compute, which D3D11 did not. Ashes uses a modest amount of it, which gave us a noticeable perf improvement. It was mostly opportunistic where we just took a few compute tasks we were already doing and made them asynchronous, Ashes really isn't a poster-child for advanced GCN features.

                      Our use of Async Compute, however, pales with comparisons to some of the things which the console guys are starting to do. Most of those haven't made their way to the PC yet, but I've heard of developers getting 30% GPU performance by using Async Compute. Too early to tell, of course, but it could end being pretty disruptive in a year or so as these GCN built and optimized engines start coming to the PC. I don't think Unreal titles will show this very much though, so likely we'll have to wait to see. Has anyone profiled Ark yet?

                      In the end, I think everyone has to give AMD alot of credit for not objecting to our collaborative effort with Nvidia even though the game had a marketing deal with them. They never once complained about it, and it certainly would have been within their right to do so. (Complain, anyway, we would have still done it, )

                      --
                      P.S. There is no war of words between us and Nvidia. Nvidia made some incorrect statements, and at this point they will not dispute our position if you ask their PR. That is, they are not disputing anything in our blog. I believe the initial confusion was because Nvidia PR was putting pressure on us to disable certain settings in the benchmark, when we refused, I think they took it a little too personally.
                      source
                      http://www.overclock.net/t/1569897/v...enchmarks/1200

                      previous blog post also interesting
                      http://www.oxidegames.com/2015/08/16...-of-a-new-api/
                      Last edited by humbug; 03 September 2015, 12:53 PM.

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