Is DirectX 12 Worth the Trouble?

Kaapstad · 28 Feb 2017 at 08:05

https://www.techpowerup.com/231079/is-directx-12-worth-the-trouble

Never been a fan of DX12 and now it is starting to look like a white elephant.

Bazzards · 28 Feb 2017 at 08:12

I thought the whole idea of dx was to make game development easier, I think dx12 is a step backward In that regard.

SiDeards73 · 28 Feb 2017 at 08:32

So Async compute is the way forward and DX12 is worth using for specific scenarios, and not to be overly used at the detriment of your game, sounds good.

JediFragger · 28 Feb 2017 at 08:33

I get anything upto a 50% increase in The Division using DX12 with my XFX Fury ([email protected]). Incredible increwases all around, but strangely the internal benchmark only shows a minimal increase! I think it's platform dependent though, as others haven't seen this type of increase.

To say I'm bloody happy is an understatement, as it gives me a v nice boost esp in the minimums!!

Silent_Scone · 28 Feb 2017 at 08:43

The Division is one of the more pleasing DX12 implementations to date. Others are a little on the flaky side. Doom is another triumph. These things take time. The transition was always going to be glacial, unfortunately marketing has not helped it's case.

Bazzards · 28 Feb 2017 at 08:48

I must give dx12 a go in-game then, I only ran the inbuilt benchmark and was not impressed.

JediFragger · 28 Feb 2017 at 09:02

Silent_Scone said:
The Division is one of the more pleasing DX12 implementations to date. Others are a little on the flaky side. Doom is another triumph. These things take time. The transition was always going to be glacial, unfortunately marketing has not helped it's case.

It really is excellent for me. Checkout the fps counter in the top left of each screenshot. Same scene, same time of day (with the only thing changed is the DX rendering option) - 47 vs 80!!

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/30540051

Rroff · 28 Feb 2017 at 09:29

Silent_Scone said:
The transition was always going to be glacial, unfortunately marketing has not helped it's case.

Yet there were many on here insistent all newer games would be ported to dx12 in 6 months from launch and it was going to be amazing.

Nice to see as per that presentation people finally coming round to what I've been saying all along regarding dx12 type APIs now the dust has settled.

Kaapstad · 28 Feb 2017 at 09:36

Rroff said:
Yet there were many on here insistent all newer games would be ported to dx12 in 6 months from launch and it was going to be amazing.

This^

r7slayer · 28 Feb 2017 at 09:49

Its because the devs need to make ganes with dx12 in mind and not patched in. Even now new games are getting it patched in because the engine was not developed for dx12. Once
this happens and dx12 is developed for properly i believe then we will see dx12 come to play properly.

andicole0 · 28 Feb 2017 at 09:52

I have seen some improvement in fps with DX12 but so far I've had technical issues (crashes) with several attempts to use it forcing me to go back to the slower DX11.
I'm sure it has a future but it's not there yet.
Issues I have had are not being able to run in full screen mode usually having to run in borderless windowed and DX12 doesn't seem to like having a second screen running for hardware monitoring etc.
Andi.

Clarkson · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:04

I'm a bit thick when it comes to this stuff. I am apparently running DX 12 (run > 'dxdiag') but I'm only playing The Witcher 3 at the moment, which a brief internet search reveals is not on DX 12. So is this a case of backwards compatibility where it just reverts back to the DX version used by a specific game?
?

VincentHanna · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:09

DX12 in Deus Ex was horribly stuttery when I was playing the latest 'Criminal Past' DLC at the weekend.

Went back to DX11 which was much better.

BigBANGtheory · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:09

yes as I understand it DirectX12 understands Dx11,10 & 9 API calls and is backward compatible for the most part

Clarkson · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:11

BigBANGtheory said:
yes as I understand it DirectX12 understands Dx11,10 & 9 API calls and is backward compatible for the most part

Makes sense, thanks

Toss3 · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:17

This has to be one of the most useless presentations at GDC ever; I mean what is the point of this exactly? This is nothing any decent developer wouldn't already know, and stating "don't try to implement it unless you know what you are doing, and basically just focus on making a better game instead" is just ridiculous. Maybe leave this stuff to the experts? And every time you work with dx12 you learn and get better, so telling people to stay away is just backwards thinking.

Nexus18 · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:19

Well DX 12 and vulkan have been superb for my system. It seems like the only people ever really disappointed with DX 12 are nvidia users

or/and people with high end CPUs as well as high end GPUs.

Either way, we will see more dx12 and eventually DX 12 only titles at some point, it is inevitable. Same happened with DX 9, 10 and 11 yet look at all the games, which we got in the end... Plus Microsoft are being even more pushy with this version.

Cooper · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:30

Well DX12 was (one of) the main reasons being touted for 'upgrading' to W10 and all the benefits it would bring, and from what I've seen so far, it isn't and I haven't.

drunkenmaster · 28 Feb 2017 at 10:38

Kaapstad said:
Never been a fan of DX12 and now it is starting to look like a white elephant.

Didn't read it then I take it?

Hardware support to async compute is limited to only the latest GPU architectures, and requires further tuning specific to the hardware.

This isn't a DX12 thing, this is for ANY new feature supported in DX11 as well, it will still start off as something only high end hardware supports and need tuning. We've always had the new hardware having new features that take an age to get used in games because devs focus on the wider support. software follows hardware, how the industry has always worked, literally always.

you could succeed, such as in case of "Rise of the Tomb Raider," in which users noticed "significant gains" with the new API.

They pat themselves on the back for DX12 they did, despite it being a bad implementation, but the game had major performance problems in DX11 and 12, DX12 eventually ended up being superior. They made three recent games with AMD support, Thief, which got Mantle which HUGELY improved it's framerate, the first new Tomb Raider which was smooth as hell, looked great and played great at launch, then Deus Ex, no problem with DX12, it was faster(more for AMD users, quelle surprise) and the game ran great in DX11 or 12. Then they made.... a game with Nvidia, that game got stupid new features, it ran like filth in DX11 at launch, it ran almost worse in DX12 when that was finally added, then eventually got better in DX12.

More importantly....

They also concede that Async Compute is the way forward, and if not console-rivaling performance gains, it can certainly benefit the PC.

Is it worth it the talk is titled..... they concede that yes, it obviously is.

They're also happy to have gotten rid of AFR multi-GPU as governed by the graphics driver, which was unpredictable and had little control (remember those pesky 400 MB driver updates just to get multi-GPU support?). The new API-governed AFR means more work for the developer, but also far greater control, which the speaker believe, will benefit the users.

Oh right, they hated supporting MGPU in DX11, it's more direct work but gives much more control and takes much less fixing to make work in DX12. So it's a little more work upfront(but less work trying to get driver fixes and patching games), but that work gets them very good MGPU which doesn't require weeks or months of updates and fixes to get working with specific driver sets... which get broken the next time they update the game and gives the end user a better experience.

Memory management is the hardest part about DirectX 12, but the developer community is ready to embrace the innovation (such as mega-textures, tiled-resources, etc). The speakers conclude stating that DirectX 12 is hard, it can be worth the extra effort,

So speaker concludes... DX12 worked for them in the latest Tomb Raider, they agree it's the future, MGPU is better for the end user in DX12, it's harder but better. Things we knew before DX12 was announced let alone launched.

It categorically gives better performance, it gives better mgpu, async is the future and it works in their games. SO even the guy trying to poo-poo it... says it worked for them and theirs was a bad implementation.

Basically the talk can be summed up as, that memory stacking, which only idiots harped on about as being a real thing, really can't be done effectively in DX12... everything else is definitely an improvement.

Nasher · 28 Feb 2017 at 11:11

Silent_Scone said:
The Division is one of the more pleasing DX12 implementations to date. Others are a little on the flaky side. Doom is another triumph. These things take time. The transition was always going to be glacial, unfortunately marketing has not helped it's case.

Doom is more about what Vulkan can do than DX12.