Graphics Pascal and Polaris Discussion Thread

Never said it was, the multiple render paths may of contributed to the lack of testing it seemed to recieve to fix the bugs.

In truth most PC games are no longer worth pre ordering till you know where the game stands compared to the console version. Closer you are to a games minimum specs the more true that stands.

There is only Doom on PC that has not suffered some launch issues of the big AAA games released in the last year.

Vulkan seems to offer higher max fps vs dx12 but with lower min fps. I'd prefer a more stable min and max which dx12 seems to offer more in the games it's in.

I wonder if Vulkan is favoured more by some cause it does not need Windows 10.

 

well Overwatch doesn't seem to have had any problems - but its blizzard , and they will delay a game to fix issues than launch a buggy *cough batman* cough non playable mess


like OGL , Vulkan can be used on windows xp.... so that's 60% of the remaining market than *just* 40% for win 10 only....


so , oooh 100% of windows systems *could* play BF1 under vulkan

 

Overwatch min requirements are only token applicable as it runs even below that pretty well. Blizzard is more the exception.

if the performance tables on Vulkan where turned and Nvidia out performed AMD on Vulkan would you and Andy still say it's the next best thing ? You both spammed dx12 when it launched was the best thing.

Steam hardware as linked by yourself had Windows 10 ahead of Windows 7 in ownership. Windows XP is dead do AMD or Nvidia even release a driver anymore? Performance gains on Windows 10 where enough to convince me to upgrade.

 

I'm far more impressed with Vulkan over DX12. Far more impressed. How you can take a modern title that looks half decent and chuck it around with ultra settings enabled at 1440p on a £200 card is just a marvel.

DX12 was supposed to lower CPU use and pass it onto the GPUs and was going to revolutionalise gaming as we knew it. It's a bit crap really. Looks the same as DX11 and the frame boosts are pretty lame.

I would also prefer to see Vulkan as it also works on Linux AFAIK which would mean that more of these big titles are playable on Linux as well as OSX. DX12 is limited to Windows, and even worse it's limited to Windows 10.

Why would you want to develop games for one platform and one target audience when you could develop for every major platform and OS?

 

Whilst I agree that Vulkan is impressive I'd argue that DX12 has been Damn impressive too for AMD cards at least based upon my experience with Total War: Warhammer. My 290x received a 40% FPS boost going from DX11 to 12, this is with everything at maximum at 1080p. Just because most Nvidia cards haven't enabled / aren't able to do DX12 it's still incredibly useful especially in games like total war that are often CPU limited / have highly parallel workloads.

Sent from my SM-N915FY using Tapatalk

 

DX12 is better for AMD cards because it does lower the CPU overheads. However, even with that done the figures are nowhere near as impressive as Vulkan.

I also don't want to use Windows for day to day any more so I would like the option to play a few games when I feel like it. And the last time I did that in OSX I was a little disappointed at the lack of titles.

Think about it. If Vulkan takes off you could actually ditch Windows forever. Or, at least have the freedom to choose without hobbling your game collection and being left out by your mates.

 

That's more down to the game engine than the API. You can have a DX12 game that looks and runs like total garbage and a DX9 game that looks excellent. Low-level APIs may even increase the garbage quotient, as companies that do not have the skills (i.e. do not want to hire skilled coders) to take advantage of low-level coding decide that "DX12!" is a marketing label they need to have on the box so mandate it.
Low-level APIs take a bunch of work that was previously done (or not done) by the GPU vendor's driver development teams, and puts it into the hands of the game engine developer. If the engine developer does not re-do all that work for each architecture, then the game won't see much (if any) benefit on that architecture. And if they get things wrong, then performance will be worse.

Judging a game by its graphics API used is like judging an artwork by the paintbrush used.

 

I'm not judging the game. I am judging how the API runs the game, and its performance increase over DX11.

I was hugely impressed with Mantle. However, in BF4 it kind of seemed like a Beta. Frame increases were very good but the graphics seemed a little fuzzy.

We'll see I guess. I just prefer the option to move away from Windows if I can. And I would, in a heartbeat, *if* I could play my games on other operating systems. No matter how impressive DX12 may become it will always have that anchor attached to it sadly.

 

meh I still love DX12 on my GTX 980 but that's because it plays the games I enjoy @4k

 

Id like to see Doom ran outside of windows using Vulkan and compare fps figures. Would Linux or OSX deliver comparable results. Denovo DRM blocks Doom running outside of Windows though. They would need to disable it for it to be benched.

I seem to remember Dooms lead engine dev even suggesting PS4 + Dx12 was the way to go for most major devs.

axelgneiting @aras_p @idSoftwareTiago @NIV_Anteru DX12+"PS4-Api" -> you are settled in a uniform world,covering all important.

Thats his post there. Axel is lead engine programmer at ID.

 

My point was that those are not properties down to Mantle, but down to the Frostbyte engine.

 

Nvidia GPUs do tile based rasterization http://www.realworldtech.com/tile-based-rasterization-nvidia-gpus/

 

wonder if they are using any powervr tech

edit

actually I'm a numpty

Nv bought 3dfx , who had already bought gigapixel , who had demonstrated the GP-1 tiler in 1999 at computex , with Spectre supposed to be the GP-3.

to quote daveb3d:

 

I see. However, BF4 was not fuzzy using DX11 so it was something to do with Mantle. But you're correct, it was probably down to Frostbyte using Mantle.

 

Very interesting. Maxwell already beats the pants of geometry workloads (all the hooh-hah over tessellation levels), which was always the Achilles' Heel of TBDR. This also goes somewhat towards explaining the effectiveness of Maxwell & Pascal in shader-heavy workloads: they're not memory bandwidth constrained because they're tiling. Similar with async shading: if operations are tiled, then compute jobs don;t need to try and slip in between render jobs, they can be slipped between tiles.

Exactly. The benefit of low-level APIs is also their critical weakness: a game will only perform as well as the game engine developer has optimised it per architecture. Someone could write an engine to target Vulkan and only bother to optimise for Pascal, and it will run pants on Polaris. Similar, you could optimise an engine targeting DX12 for Polaris and it will run pants on Pascal.
Neither API favours one vendor over another. The ball is entirely in the court of the engine developer.

 

Can't be arsed to wait for the next AMD cards. Just bought a 1070 gtx. Went for the msi aero oc version because it's a reference design for a water block a few months down the line.

Hopefully I'll have it by Wednesday. In my PC probably on the weekend. My gf is going to be jealous. She has a r9 290x... and wants to upgrade, but hasa freesync monitor.

 

Today's the day eh? I wonder what the announcement will be exactly?

 

It's usually 2pm.

 

Well, it's up for order, and there's a limit of two per customer.

 

It's £1099 each lol, it had better double the 1080 performance for that cash lol