What's the current state of Vulkan and when might wider adoption, if at all, happen with respect to games and GPUs? Trying to decide on a GPU between £200-£300. Considering the 470, 480, 1060 and maybe even the 1070. When might I expect GPU prices to drop? I know Black Friday/Cyber Monday is coming up soon and I can wait until then, if that's the window of opportunity. Why is stock still pretty scarce on a lot of GPUs and what is up with MSI pricing recently as well?
GPU prices are static as there materials to make them are hard to get still. Brexit has pushed U.K. Pricing up also. Nvidia basically has a free ride at the top of the market also. Vulkan is 2-3 years from even close to mainstream, a few sponsored titles between here and there. Dx12 will likely see wider adoption quicker just due to Microsoft's own store. Forza horizon 3 and gears of war 4 are both dx12 titles. These are both massive titles. Vulkan needs its own big AAA releases to stand a fighting chance.
Any major difference between dx12 to dx11? What I've seen so far pretty even, will this also be the cse in 12 months? I'm still on win 7, so will dx11 be ok through the next 18 months?
The major difference between DX11 and DX12 is that all the architecture-specific optimisations need to occur within the GPU driver for DX11, written by the GPU vendor. For DX12, all that work needs to be done by the game/engine developer instead. If they do not, then they will not be getting the full performance possible for that architecture, and may even perform worse than DX11. tl;dr: DX11 - easier to develop for, complex coding done by GPU vendor, limited by features implemented by GPU vendor (e.g. AMD never bothering to impelemtn multithreading) DX12 - harder to develop for, cokplex coding just be done by game/engine developer, potential for higher performance with effort and skill.
So DX12 is likely to overtake DX11 in the next year, but by how much? If a game is developed on DX12 only it cannot be played on Win7 (DX11) I presume?
Yes to the former, no idea how long it will take. Yes to the latter, Windows 7 need not apply. Or Windows 8/8.1 IIRC.
Microsoft are the ones pushing dx12 the transferring off every Major Xbox exclusive is doing them favours. PS4 does not use any version of dx12, Xbox uses bits of the code but once again very little off it. I would actually say Ports are at all time low for just how bad they are right now. Microsoft is basically willing to sacrifice the Xbox for windows 10 sales.
DX11 and DX12 will continue to exist simultaneously. DX11 continues active development, because a low-level API is not the right tool for many tasks. Many devs are adding 'DX12 support' to games because the majority of gamers think "12 is one more than 11, so it must be better!". Many of these titles unsurprisingly perform worse under DX12 than DX11 due to the lack of the necessary optimisation.
Every game I've played with DX12 has performed far better on AMD hardware, this is down to the developers and AMD having mature DX12 hardware. Sent from my SM-N915FY using Tapatalk
AMD's gains from DX12 are mostly down to removing driver bottlenecks: AMD never implemented DX11's multithreading support, so their driver was often the limiting point of performance (e.g. Project Cars) due to oly having a single path for dispatch. Then there's thread scheduling: AMD moved scheduling out of the driver into hardware, but that means that non-serial (i.e. asynchronous) dispatch only occurs with DX12 when specifically implemented. For DX11, whole swathes of ALUs and shaders lie idle because they don't get jobs dispatched to them. Nvidia have thread-scheduling in the driver, so even under DX11 Async Compute has been occurring all long, so DX12 doesn't suddenly give any benefit. This is because the driver is watching all the call coming in, so can identify implicit parallelism, while dispatch for AMD is after calls are issued by the driver to the GPU, so can only handle explicit. This started back with Fermi, 6 years and 3 architectures ago: Scheduling is also why when you compare the on-paper FLOP performance of a GCN GPU vs. a Maxwell/Pascal GPU, it doesn't match up to the in-practice performance in games: the hardware is there to back up those FLOP numbers, but if that hardware doesn't actually get used then it's just dead die area.
This is a problem, for dx12 or vulkan to massively take off, it would have to show gains on all 3 gpu manufactures. Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Otherwise you develop for your biggest target base which is still dx11 nvidia cards. Or windows 10 dx12 supported cards. No single gpu manufacture offers full dx12 support yet. Vulkan would be good for gamers as it works under windows 7. Microsofts dx12 has better games though. Gears 4, Forza Horizon 3, Dues ex been 3 in the last 3 months alone. Battlefield 1 also.
