DirectX 12 reveald at GDC 2014 by Microsoft, AMD, and Nvidia

[GuyNwah]

Moderator: There's no need to fight sarcasm with sarcasm. Keep the discussion to the merits of DirectX 12 and the technologies it competes against.

DirectX 12 probably wouldn't be getting the push it has been if it weren't for Mantle. Whether or not Mantle is ultimately dominant, the approach to programming that it espouses will push DirectX and OpenGL into similar high-performance territory. And even if Mantle remains an AMD-only product, it will pay off big on the APUs and discrete GPUs that are AMD's bread and butter.

 

[Aver]

Meanwhile Nvidia and Microsoft are both working on things that will improve performance for most setups. That's a technological accomplishment.

AMD also working on DirectX 12... and Intel... and Qualcomm. But it seems that you see only green color.

 

[CostinRaz]

I see how AMD is only going to support DX12 on just 40% of it's DX11 cards while Nvidia is going to do it on all their DX11 cards.

 

[Aver]

I see how AMD is only going to support DX12 on just 40% of it's DX11 cards while Nvidia is going to do it on all their DX11 cards.

You are talking about number of model, not about numbers of users. When DX12 will be released, the newest card that won't be supporting DirectX 12 will be 5 years old, so I bet it will be less than 10%.

Also they said that video cards with GCN architecture will support DX12 for sure and they are not sure about other cards. They plan to release full list of cards supporting DX12 later this year.

 

[Username.]

Unfortunately their GDC presentation about improving DX 11 ended up being not true.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/1...-shouldnt-trust-manufacturer-provided-numbers

Extremely dubious reporting from this website, these drivers are meant to help in CPU-limited scenarios(like Star Swarm) so if you aren't CPU-limited, which in most cases you aren't, you won't see a big performance increase.

I wonder if this driver helps with frame times, FPS is pretty much useless for anything other than dick waving.

 

[CostinRaz]

The drivers make for a smoother gameplay experience as reported by most users who have switched to them.

Also they said that video cards with GCN architecture will support DX12 for sure and they are not sure about other cards. They plan to release full list of cards supporting DX12 later this year.

That does say quite a bit in itself whereas Nvidia is making the claim that they will support DX12 on all their DX11 cards.

I bet it will be less than 10%.

Don't make bets you can't win. If one looks at Steam Hardware Survey they find a significant amount of AMD cards are not actually GNC.

Out of all cards that support DX11 27.36 % are AMD. 49.49% are Nvidia and 13.39% are listed as other while the remaining % are Intel Integrated GPUs.

Now out all cards on the page only 9.23% are listed as being GNC cards. So yes Nvidia is right on the numbers of cards in USE. At least based off steam statistics.

 

[Aver]

Don't make bets you can't win. If one looks at Steam Hardware Survey they find a significant amount of AMD cards are not actually GNC.

Don't look at numbers if you don't know what you are looking for*. Non-GCN cards will be 5 years old when DirectX will be available (if Microsoft has a steady aim, because their words "we aim for..." didn't sound exactly like a solid statement). Just check Steam survey stats and look at series AMD's series 5 (that is 5 years old now). There are only two cards listed in top list, they have 13% of AMD's market share, and better one lost 25% of its market share in last 4 months. When DX12 will come, series 6XXX will be in similar state - disappearing from the market.

But as I said, AMD didn't say that series 6XXX won't support DX12, they just didn't confirm it. It's kinda reasonable thing to not make such statements about API almost 2 years before its premiere. Unless you are Nvidia that likes to make bold statements on big stages like "revolutionary driver update" or... ok, I won't mention Shield, damn, I just did.

Also I wouldn't treat DX12 like it's some kind of Messiah. Not yet. So far they showed us how good it is by running X1 game on Titan. Maybe for Nvidia its success that their 1000$ card can run a game as well as AMD's 200$ APU, but I need something better than that.

*I can make B-grade movie quotes too!

 

[CostinRaz]

When DX12 will come, series 6XXX will be in similar state - disappearing from the market.

In 2 years you will see a market share drop, but not one as massive as you would like to believe. Some of the more popular Nvidia cards on that list are years old as well, people still use them.

There are popular Nvidia cards that will be 5 years old, even older in some cases, when DX 12 comes out.

"revolutionary driver update"

Except that it actually is just that, oh sure not to the levels some people think Nvidia was hyping out to be but still large improvements anyway.

 

[ballowers100]

I read a few things today. One VALVe employee is not happy about OpenGL and another guy wrote a reply to that VALVe employee some stuff.

Here are the 3 articles I read.

http://richg42.blogspot.hu/2014/05/things-that-drive-me-nuts-about-opengl.html
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/465628936420851712
http://timothylottes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/re-things-that-drive-me-nuts-about.html

Timothy Lottes wrote this:

"Mantle and D3D12 are going to thoroughly leave GL behind (again!) on the performance and ..." --- Are they? I'm not sure. There is now a NVIDIA beta driver for DX11 that has a DX11 780ti going faster than a Mantle 290x in BF4, StarSwarm, and Theif. Is the DX12 "single view type per table" design really the best mapping to modern bindless hardware (see slide 22)? Multiple view types times multiple descriptor tables (for engines which update descriptor tables with different per-draw, per-material, per-mesh frequency): sounds like lots of extra loads for different table base addresses. OpenGL's bindless might actually be a better design. Even on GCN, OpenGL's joint {texture, sampler} might provide better performance than separate textures and samplers (it saves a scalar load, important for low wave occupancy cases). Of the exception of parallel command buffer generation, GL currently has bindless and persistent mapped buffers (arguably the two most important features for performance). Of the rest of the non-bindless cases {for example constant buffers and shaders}, can a single thread with an optimized driver easily reach the point at which the GPU starts to loose performance do to fixed function state changes introducing GPU internal pipeline bubbles (answer here I believe is easily yes)? Will all engines go wide across many threads to leverage parallel command buffer generation (likely yes), but will random OS thread preemption cause random latency problems? Will DX12's HLSL actually expose the important ISA features of the vendors (features that are currently exposed in GL via extensions)? Etc..

Read the rest of those 2 articles and tweet I linked.

Rich Geldreich's co-workers aren't to happy about his post because they say it will make video game developers turn away from OpenGL and SteamOS.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Those are good informative articles. His main point is, Khronos should work on simplifying the API. The main factor however remains, that besides OpenGL there is nothing there that's portable. So may be Valve can direct this criticism into something positive and push Khronos group forward. They are supposedly a member.

https://www.khronos.org/about/

If AMD can achieve that state (of being supported by all GPUs and OSes) with Mantle - even better. But so far I don't see it being any easier than improving OpenGL itself in the next iteration.

 

[sidspyker]

The "other guy" is Timothy Lottes, he used to work at NVIDIA(3-4 years) and then at Epic games, I don't know where he is currently but most likely still at Epic.
Most famous among 'gamers' for the FXAA Injector tool he created a while ago.

 

[ballowers100]

The "other guy" is Timothy Lottes, he used to work at NVIDIA(3-4 years) and then at Epic games, I don't know where he is currently but most likely still at Epic.
Most famous among 'gamers' for the FXAA Injector tool he created a while ago.

Timothy Lottes still works for Epic Games.

The strange thing is I watched Epic Games live twitch.com stream on May 8th of the new Unreal Tournament and Epic Games announced in a new patch for Unreal Engine 4 that will be released soon Windows XP support will be added. Epic Games said that there's a lot of people using Windows XP and that support should not be dropped any time soon.

I guess CD Projekt RED should add Windows XP and DirectX 9 support to REDengine 3 and the PC version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? Since a lot of sales still come from Windows XP? What do you think?

I mean I talked to like 2 video game developers who are developing video games running on Unreal Engine 4 that will have Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 support to get the most sales that they can once they put up their PC versions of video games for sale on Steam.

I mean if RPG video games will be released for sale that run on Unreal Engine 4 and on Windows XP then it would be good for CD Projekt RED to do this as well maybe that's another reason why The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt got delayed to February 2015. I Privately Messaged (PM'd) Marcin Momot a few times to see if Windows XP support can happen.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

I guess CD Projekt RED should add Windows XP and DirectX 9 support to REDengine 3 and the PC version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? Since a lot of sales still come from Windows XP? What do you think?

I don't think so. It's like trying to support IE6 prolonging its usage when it needs to be discarded for good instead. Some things just need to go already. Instead of adding support for DX9, they'd better add support for OpenGL 4.x, which is more forward thinking. Plus CDPR said, that DX9 technically doesn't support what they need.

 

[sidspyker]

No I don't really think anyone needs to support XP anymore, it's been too many years.

Let's take Steam for example, now obviously not all the people use Steam but a lot of people who play videogames do have it installed so according to Steam stats, this is how Windows stands.
View attachment 3158

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc

 

[ballowers100]

No I don't really think anyone needs to support XP anymore, it's been too many years.

Let's take Steam for example, now obviously not all the people use Steam but a lot of people who play videogames do have it installed so according to Steam stats, this is how Windows stands.
View attachment 3158

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc

Steam doesn't account for all of Windows XP world wide 25% of PC's world wide still run Windows XP like ATM's, businesses, (Where I work they had Windows 7 before I got hired but my moms job upgraded to Windows 7 like only a year ago 3rd world countries like China and India use Windows XP a lot. China is the land of Windows XP) government agencies, and schools. Epic Games is going to add Windows XP support to Unreal Engine 4 with OpenGL they will probably add DirectX 9 support I messaged them about it they are exploring it cause they know a lot of PC gamers play only on Windows XP especially those PC gamers who play 10+ year old video games and don't want to upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7 and play video games that run on DirectX 10 and DirectX 11.

I mean I got a PC that has Windows XP installed to play video games that have Windows XP support on it while my main PC that I am typing on right now is Windows 7. I know a lot of old video games that are sold on Steam support Windows 7 now as well as on gog.com but I like to play on Windows XP from time to time you know nostalgia feelings.

I only purchase video games that have Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 support if Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 support is missing I will not purchase support for all 5 Windows versions are needed for me to purchase PC versions of video games. It's just the way I am LOL. So DirectX 9 support is needed heck both DirectX 9 and OpenGL support would be great.

Windows XP is still good to use and Nvidia said they will improve DirectX 9 more than ever before DirectX 9 is gonna lack what DirectX 11 has like tessellation, etc though. Support for Windows ME and below and DirectX 8 and below now those should not be supported any more.

 

[Georgie_Porgie]

Slightly off topic but steam hardware survey shows that 48,21% of people have 2 physical CPU's and 43,65% have 4 physical CPU's. That's way too ridiculous, I mean 91,86% of people have high end server solutions and use it to play videogames?

 

[ballowers100]

Slightly off topic but steam hardware survey shows that 48,21% of people have 2 physical CPU's and 43,65% have 4 physical CPU's. That's way too ridiculous, I mean 91,86% of people have high end server solutions and use it to play videogames?

285 million PC gamers world wide have high end PC's out of the 600+ million PC gamers world wide.

 

[GuyNwah]

ATMs and business desktops aren't for playing games.

XP features: An obsolete driver model (XPDM) that consumes large extents of kernel memory. No driver support for newer AMD cards. 2GB of userland memory. Limited to DirectX 9. No security support.

XP is history. There is no reason except the chance of hitting the tail end of a handful of users at the low end of the market to code for it. It would be a colossal waste of time and money to backport Red Engine 3 to DirectX 9, XPDM, and 32-bit userland.

Like running the 400 meters in hobble skirts.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

@ballowers100: You do realize that XP installations like ATMs or government workstations and etc. have nothing to do with gaming, right? From any developer's perspective, global market share is way less relevant for estimating potential for sales than estimation which focuses on gamers only, which are only a subset of all users.

UPDATE: @Guy N'wah ninja'd me with answering it

 

[sidspyker]

Slightly off topic but steam hardware survey shows that 48,21% of people have 2 physical CPU's and 43,65% have 4 physical CPU's. That's way too ridiculous, I mean 91,86% of people have high end server solutions and use it to play videogames?

CPU cores