Will AMD ever fix their driver overhead?

[Durp]

I was expecting AMD to get this specific problem fixed during the RX 480 launch but it seems nothing has changed over the years. Nvidia greatly reduced the overhead in their drivers in 2014?!?!

This isn't much of an issue if you're the type of gamer who turns the resolution or settings up to keep your fps under 60 but the story changes when you try to reach 120Hz/144Hz/180Hz/240hz with AMD cards in DX11 titles.


For an example below, you can see an old GTX 770 completely demolish the much faster R9 390 when the settings are lowered in hopes of reaching higher refresh rates.



BF4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoKu0_2ozAc
GTA5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S546TL2LWNY

Just to remind you how much slower the GTX 770 is compared to the R9 390.

That's with a Haswell i7. Things will be much worse with an i5 or i3 or even.... FX. These lower end processors are the ones you will most likely find in systems that run a single RX 480. The masses are NOT playing DX12 or Vulkan games because it's not the standard yet.

Why hasn't this been fixed yet? Why isn't it ever brought up by reviewers? Will AMD ever bother improving their DX11 overhead or are they really telling their customers to continue dealing with it until all games are DX12/Vulkan or buy Nvidia?


reopened
Markfw900

 

[sandorski]

DX11 is the past now, so no, I doubt they will "fix" it.

 

[Durp]

DX11 is the past now, so no, I doubt they will "fix" it.

DX11 is not the past yet. People aren't playing ashes of the singularity, they're playing games like Overwatch which just released using DX11. Overwatch reached 10 million players after only three weeks.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Seems unlikely now that lowlevel api's are being developed for.

 

[96Firebird]

If they could've, I'm sure they would've.

Rymez.

 

[sandorski]

DX11 is not the past yet. People aren't playing ashes of the singularity, they're playing games like Overwatch which just released using DX11. Overwatch reached 10 million players after only three weeks.

Regardless, other than the overhead there are no real Performance issues to "fix". DX12 will just be used increasingly from here, it is the future, DX11 is the past.

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

Direct3D 11 won't be going away and isn't the past. Direct3D 11.3 was released for those who don't want to use Direct3D 12 but want a modern API.

 

[flopper]

requires a whole re-writing of drivers from the ground up for amd so wont happen.

 

[Durp]

requires a whole re-writing of drivers from the ground up for amd so wont happen.

Nvidia was willing to put in the work to provide a much better DX11 experience for their customers. Why is it too much to ask the same from the other half of the duopoly?

 

[Keysplayr]

Nvidia was willing to put in the work to provide a much better DX11 experience for their customers. Why is it too much to ask the same from the other half of the duopoly?

It is too much to ask from a company with a lot less resources than Nvidia.
Yes, AMD should have tried to place some more resources in providing better DX11 performance on their GPUs especially with slower CPUs. But it's not the end of the world. Just like I hope Nvidia devotes resources to constantly improving their DX12 performance on their GPUs.

AMD is just hanging on so some slack should be cut. I guess.

 

[MajinCry]

Wasn't AMD working on implementing a multithreaded driver for D3D11, but scrapped it due to insufficient funds?

http://www.techradar.com/news/compu...ards/q-a-nvidia-and-amd-talk-up-dx11-643546/2

Richard says:

"We've found that for about 50 per cent of games developers, multi-threading is the number one most attractive feature of DirectX 11. It's a case of 'If I just recode in DX11 and use the multithreaded display lists I can get an average of 20 per cent extra performance?'
"If you're struggling, as many games developers are, to use more than a single core DX11 makes the missing cores easy to get at.
"Not only are the terms of DirectX 11 multi-threaded, but most importantly, when you talk to DirectX through one CPU core that very often becomes the bottleneck. Now you can talk to it from all of the CPU cores and they can push data to the graphics card more efficiently.
"That's a purely software benefit that anyone with DirectX 9 or above hardware can enjoy."

Shame, really. Draw calls are a major bottleneck, and devs don't exactly rewrite renderers for games that are done and done. These D3D 11 games are here ta stay.

 

[linkgoron]

The 290 is almost three years old, I think that if they could have solved it they would have by now.

Either GCN is fundamentally "broken" or AMD just doesn't have the resources to fix it.

To their credit, the 290 was basically equal to the 780 at release, and is now 20% faster according to TPU. So, at least they have better longevity.

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/R9_290/images/perfrel_1920.gif
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png

 

[Yakk]

Doing the work within the driver using hacks is a band-aid to the real issue with the DX11 API itself.

 

[Spjut]

Did someone do overhead tests on AMD's older architectures as well? It'd be interesting to know if the older series too had higher overhead or if just GCN suffers from it

 

[Azix]

DX11 is not the past yet. People aren't playing ashes of the singularity, they're playing games like Overwatch which just released using DX11. Overwatch reached 10 million players after only three weeks.

and overwatch runs fine. Its not a big enough issue to need fixing especially with dx12/vulkan here now. Would be poor usage of resources this late in the game

Wasn't AMD working on implementing a multithreaded driver for D3D11, but scrapped it due to insufficient funds?

http://www.techradar.com/news/compu...ards/q-a-nvidia-and-amd-talk-up-dx11-643546/2

Shame, really. Draw calls are a major bottleneck, and devs don't exactly rewrite renderers for games that are done and done. These D3D 11 games are here ta stay.

I think they actually talked about this on reddit AMA or something like it. Said it was only good for benchmarks over a few seconds or minutes and wasn't worth it. Could be too hard finding the link to be sure.

 

[AtenRa]

DX11 is not the past yet. People aren't playing ashes of the singularity, they're playing games like Overwatch which just released using DX11. Overwatch reached 10 million players after only three weeks.

You can push 100+fps with a sub $100 CPU (FX6300 or Core i3 ) in Overwatch, but you need a faster CPU in other games like Total War Warhammer, and DX-12 is what you want. Not to mention all XBone games will be DX-12 for both the Consoles and PC from now on. And every major AAA game coming the next 6-12 months will also be DX-12.

So nobody said DX-11 is dead, but everyone (NV Included) are optimizing both hardware and software for DX-12 from now on.

Edit: Ehm, you dont even need a dGPU to play Overwatch, not that much demanding game.

 

[Azix]

AMDs comment on multithreading in dx11

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...ologies_group_qa_is_happening_here_on/d0m6m5v

Because DCLs are useless. They've been inappropriately positioned as a panacea for DX11's modest multi-threading capabilities, but most journalists and users exploring the topic are not familiar with why DCLs are so broken or limited.

Let's say you have a bunch of command lists on each CPU core in DX11. You have no idea when each of these command lists will be submitted to the GPU (residency not yet known). But you need to patch each of these lists with GPU addresses before submitting them to the graphics card. So the one single CPU core in DX11 that's performing all of your immediate work with the GPU must stop what it's doing and spend time crawling through the DCLs on the other cores. It's a huge hit to performance after more than a few minutes of runtime, though DCLs are very lovely at arbitrarily boosting benchmark scores on tests that run for ~30 seconds.

The best way to do DX11 is from our GCN Performance tip #31: A dedicated thread solely responsible for making D3D calls is usually the best way to drive the API.Notes: The best way to drive a high number of draw calls in DirectX11 is to dedicate a thread to graphics API calls. This thread’s sole responsibility should be to make DirectX calls; any other types of work should be moved onto other threads (including processing memory buffer contents). This graphics “producer thread” approach allows the feeding of the driver’s “consumer thread” as fast as possible, enabling a high number of API calls to be processed.

 

[Durp]

You can push 100+fps with a sub $100 CPU (FX6300 or Core i3 ) in Overwatch, but you need a faster CPU in other games like Total War Warhammer, and DX-12 is what you want. Not to mention all XBone games will be DX-12 for both the Consoles and PC from now on. And every major AAA game coming the next 6-12 months will also be DX-12.

So nobody said DX-11 is dead, but everyone (NV Included) are optimizing both hardware and software for DX-12 from now on.

Edit: Ehm, you dont even need a dGPU to play Overwatch, not that much demanding game.

Please attempt reading the thread. I specifically mentioned that this overhead is more of a problem for people with high refresh rate monitors. Not 40fps or 100fps, more like 144/180/240. Has anyone seen an Overwatch 1080p min settings benchmark to compare like the videos I posted? I haven't.

 

[AtenRa]

Please attempt reading the thread. I specifically mentioned high refresh rate monitors. Not 40fps or 100fps, more like 144/180/240. Has anyone seen an Overwatch 1080p min settings benchmark to compare like the videos I posted? I haven't.

As i have said, you get more than 100fps with very cheap CPUs like Core i3 and FX 6300 if you have the GPU or lower Graphics settings. The game is not that demanding.

 

[Durp]

As i have said, you get more than 100fps with very cheap CPUs like Core i3 and FX 6300 if you have the GPU or lower Graphics settings. The game is not that demanding.

Now you're posting a benchmark using Nvidia cards. We have already established Nvidia has worked on and has a great DX11 driver. Plus this benchmark has an fps cap enabled.

This is your second post that completely misses the point.

 

[AtenRa]

Now you're posting a benchmark using Nvidia cards. We have already established Nvidia has worked on and has a great DX11 driver. Plus this benchmark has an fps cap enabled.

This is your second post that completely misses the point.

The point is that Overwatch is not demanding and IF there is a CPU overhead on the AMD cards you sure will not have a problem with it because you will still get more than 100fps.

 

[digitaldurandal]

In a way instead of focusing on DX11 they chose to push Mantle which evolved the next generation API.

Honestly, this only affects very few gamers in very specific situations. If you are using a high end card and running high settings you won't notice.

The biggest situation where this comes into play is actually not the one you have shown but it is when you have a less powerful CPU and a low to mid range GPU. The driver overhead eats too much of the CPU processing time and because of this even if the AMD GPU was equivalent or better than Nvidia's offering it will lag behind in FPS.

It has been widely known here on the forums that if you are suggesting a GPU to someone with a less powerful CPU that Nvidia has an advantage here.

I don't think you will see AMD backtracking to attempt this. I think they put a lot of money and research into Mantle and it was a smart move. With less funds you need to drive innovations that will give you the most returns, so while what you are saying is absolutely true and it sucks for whoever is impacted by that issue, more and more in the future we will see modern API's used and the impact will slowly be mitigated.

Also, someone said no one is playing Ashes, which is somewhat true but there are other games that were ignored

Doom has Vulkan
DOTA has Vulkan
RotR has DX12 (I think they fixed it)
Hitman has DX12
SC is getting DX12
Warhammer has DX12
and yes Ashes has DX12

These APIs are picking up steam faster than previous APIs IMO (no data analysis was done TBH.)

 

[cusideabelincoln]

As i have said, you get more than 100fps with very cheap CPUs like Core i3 and FX 6300 if you have the GPU or lower Graphics settings. The game is not that demanding.

I don't believe i3 and FX six cores will perform that well with AMD cards. I had a 2500k, overclocked, and during the intense firefights it would drop below 100 and into the 80s. Graphics were on low, too.

Since the game is competitive the intense firefights is where performance really matters. Sub-100 fps is not acceptable, especially for people with 100+ hz monitors.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

AMDs comment on multithreading in dx11

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...ologies_group_qa_is_happening_here_on/d0m6m5v

IF what AMD is saying is true (and I readily admit I don't know enough about the topic to say that they are or they aren't) then it goes to show how smart NV is.

NV targets benchmarks hard with their boost clocks and with these drivers because they know people buy based on benchmarks, and no one really benches games for longer than it takes for boost clocks to wear off/drivers to plug up.

As always, AMD is left competing against spit shined marketing with their earnest engineering. They can stand to learn a thing or two from NV.

 

[3DVagabond]

I was expecting AMD to get this specific problem fixed during the RX 480 launch but it seems nothing has changed over the years. Nvidia greatly reduced the overhead in their drivers in 2014?!?!

This isn't much of an issue if you're the type of gamer who turns the resolution or settings up to keep your fps under 60 but the story changes when you try to reach 120Hz/144Hz/180Hz/240hz with AMD cards in DX11 titles.


For an example below, you can see an old GTX 770 completely demolish the much faster R9 390 when the settings are lowered in hopes of reaching higher refresh rates.



BF4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoKu0_2ozAc
GTA5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S546TL2LWNY

Just to remind you how much slower the GTX 770 is compared to the R9 390.

That's with a Haswell i7. Things will be much worse with an i5 or i3 or even.... FX. These lower end processors are the ones you will most likely find in systems that run a single RX 480. The masses are NOT playing DX12 or Vulkan games because it's not the standard yet.

Why hasn't this been fixed yet? Why isn't it ever brought up by reviewers? Will AMD ever bother improving their DX11 overhead or are they really telling their customers to continue dealing with it until all games are DX12/Vulkan or buy Nvidia?


reopened
Markfw900

Yes, the performance improvement from these drivers was huge. /s

I'm not sure why we are having an AMD vs. nVidia discussion in the AMD sub forum, but the actual results from AT should put a stop to any contention that nVidia's claims are anything except marketing lies anyway. SOURCE

And if nVidia drivers are so good then why does the 280X (formerly 7970) beat the 770 (formerly 680) by ~15% now? Referencing the TPU 1080 chart above.

And those massive SLI performance improvements? They simply added a profile for TW. Where are all those people who complain about over hyping now?