DirectX 12. Are we finally going to see the benefits?

Remember all those promises the developers made when they announced directX 12? We would see better usage of system ressources and a major leap in performance. We would even be able to use different brands and types of gpu's together. New game titles would deliver insane draw distances and detail.

So far however there are only a few titles that support directX 12 and the results are generally not that impressive. Often there is a significant drop in performance when you enable the dx12 features in those games. Multiple GPU support is also hit or miss even when using a traditional SLI setup. And when you are running slightly older hardware there even is a chance DX12 won't run at all.

Now with the release of Scorpio things might change for the better. It will support DX12 and so we will see more developers going this route. It will be interesting to see if multi platform titles will be really optimized for it however. Still I'm cautiously optimistic for the future of DX12 and so I made the decision to buy a couple of new GPU's that have full support (2 1080ti's,).

So are you DX12 ready or are you planning to upgrade for it?

Um... Why did you already buy two 1080ti's if you're cautiously optimistic about the future of DX12? You could probably just as well wait for the next gen cards.

Anyway, no, I'm not planning to replace my 780 in the near future. A graphics card is basically only as good as the games it can play, most of which are pretty unappealing lately. The last big game I played was Nier, which generally ran fine.

When it comes to PC hardware I tend to just buy the current hardware and I don't worry too much about what is going to come out later. My current GPU's (980's) are going to find a new home in the PC I'm building for my nephew and I did want better DX12 support so I decided to go with the TI's. I know all the arguments against SLI and for the most part I agree that it is a questionable technology. But for me my pc is my main hobby and I really don't mind for it to be ridiculously overpowered. Some guys spend loads on tuning cars or other pointless luxuries but I just get a kick out of PC hardware.

You made me look at how many games are DX12 compatible and I'm shocked by how small the list is according to Wikipedia. Something as "new" as Nier Automata and Mass Effect Andromeda still uses DX11. Is it hard to work with or did it over-promise?

I don't think the idea of SLI is inherently bad, it's more of a scheduling problem and parallel programing challenge which game developers seem to be traditionally bad at or wary of. Though I am surprised, I would have thought that being able to mix GPUs from different manufactures, even different architectures was a pretty amazing selling point.

As far as graphics technology goes there isn't really anything obviously amazing going on, smoother shadows, different types of anti aliasing, reflections, all the newer technologies we've seen in games are just new takes on things we've seen already so it's hard to say "Wow, that's DX12!". I have yet to see the advertised performance improvements, i think that was more of a possibility than a guarantee, as before it's down to developer optimisations.

I think developers aim for DX11 support at the moment mainly because of the current console architecture. Scorpio might change that though. I remember it took a long while before we saw good DX11 implementation on PC as well. The sales pitch for DX12 was probably overselling the technology a bit (as sales pitches tend to do). The GPU mixing thing was pushed very hard when they announced DX12 for example but I wonder if the manufactures are so keen on it. I would think they would much rather have people being locked in their brand.

I think the answer is both. DX12 gets you closer to the hardware, which means it's on the developer to know how to use it. We see great results with low-level API's like Vulkan when used by really technically proficient developers like ID. However, most developers aren't making their own engine tech, so the amount of work that it would take to do DX12 or Vulkan well isn't worth it. The other problem, which speaks more to the over-promising point, is that most games are still GPU bound. My understanding is that DX12 mostly increases performance by reducing driver overhead on the CPU. That frees up the CPU to do more work on the game itself. However, if the game is already GPU bound, having more CPU resources isn't going to help much.

As for the second point, I don't think that many people own systems that can use two GPUs (only high end motherboards have support), and even among those who do lots of people don't want to run multi-gpu because it's unreliable. The mixed graphics card situation is even more problematic because it relies on the developer to implement it in some way that makes sense. If the cards run at different speeds then AFR is out, so maybe one can render the UI while the other renders the rest. Or maybe the stronger card can render two frames for every one frame the weaker card, and these can be combined in sets of three. I don't know, I'm not a developer, but it sounds like an absolute nightmare to support. I bet it's just not worth it to put in the effort for a tiny percentage of the market. It's a cool idea for sure, but I don't think it's much of a selling point.

@an_ancient: You also have to have Windows 10 to get DX12 support. So there's also that element of Microsoft deliberately fragmenting the marketplace to push Win 10 upgrades.

I just looked it up and Windows 7 still has a big market share. I did not expect that. I liked 7 a lot but since switching to 10 I have grown to like it as well. It is a bummer that all those people who run 7 won't get DX12. I bet that someone will figure out a way to make it work though.

Last DX12 supported game I played was Rise of the Tomb Raider.

@freedom4556 oh yeah, i'm in that camp like the people who held unto XP until their dying breath

@bdead@cameron also yeah i'm curious to see now if Scorpio will dent that. from the initial talk I heard, i recall them talking about grouping the GPU resources into a uniform pool and letting directx dynamically decide who gets to do what without having the game handle it. That kind of grouping of I/O isn't new in the server world. but the load sharing there tends to not have to switch in realtime. I could see it just measuring and deciding on giving a GPU a certain weight and doing it like this. That still means however that the scheduling is done by the CPU. Unless of course DX12 cards have to have an interface to be able to deal with other GPUs, but why would Nvidia agree to that if it means it would have to work with other GPUs and they already have their proprietary solution for that?

The abstract multi GPU pool does seem to be at odds with lower level hardware. Makes me wonder if they exclude each other in the SDK and the GPU Pool features was more a response for deep learning and other GPU optimized applications like Bitcoining. Sort of like Nvidia grid, but you gotta install Windows Server 2016 to get it.

@monkeyking1969 actually posted an article that talks about this multi GPU feature http://www.anandtech.com/show/9740/directx-12-geforce-plus-radeon-mgpu-preview/4 in the upgrade advice sticky thread

I had to turn it off because it made my game crash repeatedly in the last cutscene. It was a common issue. It sometimes crashed in the village too.

I turned it off because it was lowering performance without a significant increase in visual fidelity.

Doesn't the base xbox one support dx12 already? I am going to say no, dx12 was (mostly) a lie, i guess it probably does what its supposed to do but that really doesnt mean much. Dx11 took a long time to be decent as well but i am not very optimistic. It will probably help amd hardware more at least.

In a couple of years maybe? It will probably take time to mature - like DX10/11.

Few games (any?) have been released with it other than some "patched-in-later, semi-experimental" support.