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Rise of the Tomb Raider

One of the major questions readers have raised over the past year is which company's graphics cards would perform better in DirectX 12. Information technology always takes a sure amount of time to answer questions like this, and DX12 is still in the early stages of deployment, with simply a handful of titles currently bachelor: Hitman, Ascent of the Tomb Raider, Ashes of the Singularity, and Gears of State of war. Of these 4, i of them (Gears of War) is DX12-only and available solely through the Windows Store; the other titles can run in DX11 or DX12 and support multiple operating systems.

Tweaktown recently put Hitman through its paces in both APIs. In 1080p DirectX 11, Nvidia wins acme overall honors with the Titan X squeezing out the Fury 10. Switch to DirectX 12, however, and AMD'southward Fury 10 pulls ahead. The gap betwixt the AMD and Nvidia cards continues to widen as the resolution rises; AMD wins 4K in both DX11 and DX12 and the gap in 4K DX12 is large plenty that the R9 390X is able to surpass the GTX Titan Ten, as shown beneath:

hitman4K

Hitman's 4K DX12 performance. Image by Tweaktown

These results are broadly similar to the criterion results we saw in Ashes of the Singularity a few weeks before that game shipped. As in that title, Nvidia gains aught in DirectX 12 and suffers some pocket-sized performance regressions.

DirectX 12: A bifurcated story

Of the 4 DirectX 12 games currently in-market place, Ashes and Hitman are wins for AMD and prove a marked advantage in that API. Rising of the Tomb Raider, on the other paw, is a major Nvidia win. Benchmarks performed in that title show that AMD withal lags Nvidia, even when testing in DX12 and even at 4K.

We can't really draw many conclusions from Gears of War; the game appears to have been a terrible port with unplayable performance on AMD hardware, and is less than stellar fifty-fifty on Nvidia. The programmer has released several patches, only information technology's not articulate if the game's been truly fixed yet. With Fable Legends at present cancelled, our early operation tests in that championship don't tell us much, either. Still, iii games is enough to point to at least the beginnings of a trend.

First, we see AMD picking up performance relative to Nvidia in two of the three titles hither. Both Hitman and Ashes use asynchronous compute, merely Hitman's lead return programmer, Jonas Meyer, noted at GDC 2016 that doing and so but improved AMD'due south performance by 5-ten%, while Nvidia gained nothing from the feature.

HitmanPresentation

I reason AMD GPUs do ameliorate in DX12 than their Nvidia counterparts is because the new API eliminates a great deal of driver overhead, and AMD's drivers were never every bit balletic every bit Nvidia's at treatment these workloads in the showtime place. AMD'due south 4K performance in DX12 is roughly 10% faster than in DX11, which jives with Jonas Meyer's comments at GDC 2016.

What's less clear is why Nvidia consistently loses performance in every DirectX 12 game published to-date. The GTX 980 Ti is faster than the Fury 10 in Rising of the Tomb Raider when using DirectX xi or DirectX 12, merely information technology leads AMD by roughly ix% in DX11 and past just 2.4% in DX12. These performance drops aren't big in and of themselves, only if moving to DirectX 12 makes AMD 8% faster and Nvidia six% slower, y'all've got a net performance shift of 14% in favor of Team Ruby.

DirectX 12 appears to help AMD past both reducing driver overhead and allowing developers to leverage GCN'south formidable asynchronous compute capabilities. Information technology's less articulate why Nvidia continues to struggle with delivering absolute operation improvements in DirectX 12, even in titles that otherwise favor the company'south products.
It'due south still also early in the DirectX 12 / Windows 10 product bike to draw absolute conclusions about which compages will show definitively better and the imminent inflow of new GPUs from both companies will return the question at least somewhat moot. So far, it looks as though AMD gamers are generally amend off using DirectX 12 when it's available, while Nvidia owners may want to stick with DX11, even when gaming in Windows 10.

Nosotros'll continue monitoring the situation as new titles arrive and will update you accordingly.