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AMD or Nvidia - DX11/12/Vulkan/OpenGL

Associate
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1 Nov 2013
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838
I, like many others have skipped the 1070/80 in the wait for the 1080 Ti or AMD's equivalent.

Usually it would be a simple choice for me, nvidia... however the development of API's are making me reconsider my initial thought of buying 1080 ti - allow me to explain...

My new cards performance in games will be impacted by certain factors;

  • DX11 - Nvidia wins majority
  • DX12 - Depends on game e.g. AOTS/Hitman (AMD > NV) - Tombraider (NV > AMD)
  • Developers optimisation fairness - Games are coded to perform better on AMD and NV GPU's
  • Vulcan/OpenGL - im not educated enough to fully understand but i believe Vulcan works better on AMD hardware.

NV said pascal has Async Compute, but its not as good?

if i'm going to spend £800+ on a GPU i want to buy the one which will perform better under these API's, DX11 will be redundant soon, Is AMD going to beat NV due to the new API's ??
 
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Soldato
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Impossible to give accurate statements on either at this stage. If I were to take a guess I would expect Vega to have better performance even in dx11 than the standard 1080 but less than the 1080ti. Probably closer to the TI then the the Fury was in comparison to the 980ti due to its updated command processor.
Dx12 will be game dependant id imagine and Vulkan well unless nvidia sorts that out could be very one sided.
 
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As far as the new APIs go we are in early days what is true today may or may not be true tomorrow. As things stand despite the API advantages to AMD nVidia still win on all out performance by sheer bruteforce faster hardware and how that will turn out with future bigger cards is far from a predictable story.
 
Soldato
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A major factor is that the XBox One probably uses DX12(or something close to it),and the PS4 Neo looks to have a Polaris 10 based GPU and there is noise of a refreshed XBox to compete with the new PS4. If that has a Polaris 10 or Vega based based GPU,it will help AMD as many cross platform games will be developed on both GCN1.1 and GCN1.2 uarch GPUs.
 
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I think the RX480 vs 1060 is a good topic for debate as these card are essentially a real world example of DX12/Vulkan performance in it's infancy.

In DX12/Vulcan (AOTS/Hitman/Doom) the cheaper RX 480 is better than the more expensive 1060 by upto 30%, however Tombraider the 1060 is better than the cheaper RX 480.

As you say, it may simply boil down to DX12 being game developer dependant.
 
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Associate
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A major factor is that the XBox One probably uses DX12(or something close to it),and the PS4 Neo looks to have a Polaris 10 based GPU and there is noise of a refreshed XBox to compete with the new PS4. If that has a Polaris 10 or Vega based based GPU,it will help AMD as many cross platform games will be developed on both GCN1.1 and GCN1.2 uarch GPUs.

Is there an API which runs across all platforms yet? I watched a video on youtube where a scottish guy explained that amd won contracts for ps4/xbox and although didnt make much profit, their API's being developed on their hardware may shape the future of gaming as a whole.
 
Soldato
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Is there an API which runs across all platforms yet? I watched a video on youtube where a scottish guy explained that amd won contracts for ps4/xbox and although didnt make much profit, their API's being developed on their hardware may shape the future of gaming as a whole.

No,but it will definitely affect XBox One and its successor - Nvidia might be able to sponsor a number of games to make sure it does not happen,but the issue that more and more titles will have been developed on GCN1.1 and GCN1.2 based GPUs and since the MS consoles will use DX12 or a derivative of it,you can see the issue here. This biases DX12 towards AMD as a result IMHO(YMMV OFC).

So it comes down to how much money Nvidia can throw at devs TBH and if they brute force things,which is what you will see, and you can look at recent major NV sponsored titles like The Division,which should have a huge victory for NV,but that is not the case and that is DX11 too.

My GTX960 gets thrashed by the R9 380 in many newer titles now sadly but only last year they were around the same.

The same goes with Doom - I am playing that now and OpenGL is fine but Vulkan seems relatively meh in comparison. The worst thing is that Doom is by iD and Bethesda who have been closer to Nvidia for a lot of games. I would expect Doom in Vulkan to thrash AMD. Vulkan should be far more vendor neutral compared to DX12 as it won't have the console issue to contend with.

The PS4 is less of a concern as it does not run Windows and does not use DX12 or anything related to it.
 
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Soldato
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Is there an API which runs across all platforms yet? I watched a video on youtube where a scottish guy explained that amd won contracts for ps4/xbox and although didnt make much profit, their API's being developed on their hardware may shape the future of gaming as a whole.

Vulcan, it's platform agnostic, it's based off Mantle however so AMD cards see mahoosive uplift using it, however Nvidia Pascal cards also get a decent boost from it, not as much as AMD do, and Maxwell cards seem to be hit and miss with it I believe?

DX12 requires you to use Windows 10, it is also in the Xbox1 and coming to their Scorpio, Vulcan does not care if your win7, win8, win 10, Mac, Android etc
 
Soldato
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I, like many others have skipped the 1070/80 in the wait for the 1080 Ti or AMD's equivalent.

Usually it would be a simple choice for me, nvidia... however the development of API's are making me reconsider my initial thought of buying 1080 ti - allow me to explain...

My new cards performance in games will be impacted by certain factors;

  • DX11 - Nvidia wins majority
  • DX12 - Depends on game e.g. AOTS/Hitman (AMD > NV) - Tombraider (NV > AMD)
  • Developers optimisation fairness - Games are coded to perform better on AMD and NV GPU's
  • Vulcan/OpenGL - im not educated enough to fully understand but i believe Vulcan works better on AMD hardware.

NV said pascal has Async Compute, but its not as good?

if i'm going to spend £800+ on a GPU i want to buy the one which will perform better under these API's, DX11 will be redundant soon, Is AMD going to beat NV due to the new API's ??

You should go spend on order Pascal Titan X on 2 August. :D

I looked back and it seemed Nvidia had won majority everytime in DirectX 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and determind to do it again with 12 maybe with Nvidia deep learning inferencing instruction that will help prevent AMD take DirectX 12 majority for first time.

It did not looked like DirectX 11 will be redundant soon as there are very few DirectX 12 games out now but the big problem there are very few developers will use low level DirectX 12 while majority of developers wanted to stick with high level DirectX 11.3, they not interested with awful lots of extra hard works on DirectX 12, add MultiGPU, write drivers to optimisation AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs, coded and optimisation async compute each time for AMD, Nvidia and Intel. It not very fair for poor developers to do all these hard works, it best leave all these to thousands AMD, Nvidia and Intel drivers engineers to do all works themselves. Developers do not have resources to deal with it.

So far 2 Valkan games ran better on Nvidia hardware while DOOM on Valkan ran better on AMD hardware because it only supported AMD Async Compute at the time but it far too early to say DOOM Vulkan run better on AMD. Bethesda confirmed they worked with both Nvidia and Intel to add Nvidia and Intel Async Compute codes into future DOOM patch, when enabled then if Nvidia either can match or outperform AMD Async Compute then Nvidia will owned Vulkan just like OpenGL did all over again.
 
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