GeForce + Radeon: DirectX 12 Multi-Adapter with Ashes of the Singularity

[Mechev]

Article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9740/directx-12-geforce-plus-radeon-mgpu-preview

 

Sauce: http://www.anandtech.com/

 

Really interesting discovery made by Anandtech, it gives a hope for the gaming community. Can you imagine both architectures completing each other for the Ultimate GPU Rendering Setup?!

 

#mindblown

 

Seeing as this build of Ashes is a tech demo, I’m hesitant to read too much into the precise benchmark numbers we’re seeing. That said, the fact that the fastest multi-GPU setup was a mixed AMD/NVIDIA GPU setup was something I wasn’t expecting and definitely makes it all the more interesting. DirectX 11 games are going to be around for a while longer yet, so we’re likely still some time away from a mixed GPU gaming setup being truly viable, but it will be interesting to see just what Oxide and other developers can pull off with explicit multi-adapter as they become more familiar with the technology and implement more advanced rendering modes.  

 

 

It’s interesting to note that when picking these settings, the settings were chosen first and the cards second. So the fact that the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X end up being so close in average performance comes as a pleasant surprise. With AFR performance gains dependent in part on how similar the two cards are, this should give us a better look at performance than cards that differ widely in performance.

In any case what we find is that with a single card setup the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X are within 5% of each other with the older driver sets we needed to use for AFR compatibility. Both AMD and NVIDIA do see some performance gains with newer driver sets, with NVIDIA picking up 8% while AMD picks up 5%.

But more importantly let’s talk about mutli-GPU setups. If everything is working correctly and there are no unexpected bottlenecks, then on paper in mixed GPU setups we should get similar results no matter which card is the primary. And indeed that’s exactly what we find here, with only 1.4fps (2%) separating the GeForce + Radeon setups. Using the Radeon Fury X as the primary card gets the best results at 70.8fps, while swapping the order to let the GTX 980 Ti lead gives us 69.4fps.

However would you believe that the mixed GPU setups are faster than the homogenous setups? Trailing the mixed setups is the R9 Fury X + R9 Fury setup, averaging 67.1fps and trailing the slower mixed setup by 3.5%. Slower still – and unexpectedly so – is the GTX 980 Ti + GTX Titan X setup, which averages just 61.6fps, some 12% slower than the GTX 980 Ti + Fury X setup. The card setup is admittedly somewhat unusual here – in order to consistently use the GTX 980 Ti as the primary card we had to make the secondary card a GTX Titan X, seeing as how we don’t have another GTX 980 Ti or a third-tier GM200 card comparable to the R9 Fury – but even so the only impact here should be that the GTX Titan X doesn’t get to stretch its legs quite as much since it needs to wait on the slightly slower GTX 980 Ti primary in order to stay in sync.

[ivan134]

Good to finally see this in action. Inb4 AMD and Nvidia lock this in their drivers. More likely though, most devs won't bother to implement this. Not having to get rid of your old graphics card when you upgrade is a very juicy prospect though.

[KemoKa]

It still blows my mind that the Fury X sees almost no performance increase, but the 290X has an increase of 70-100%. All that means for me is that once again, the 295X2 is going to be reigning as king for a while longer...

[afyeung]

It still blows my mind that the Fury X sees almost no performance increase, but the 290X has an increase of 70-100%. All that means for me is that once again, the 295X2 is going to be reigning as king for a while longer...

Fury X has more less powerful cores. 290x has 2816 powerful Hawaii cores, still the most powerful AMD has made yet and almost on par with Maxwell in terms of brute performance.

[ivan134]

It still blows my mind that the Fury X sees almost no performance increase, but the 290X has an increase of 70-100%. All that means for me is that once again, the 295X2 is going to be reigning as king for a while longer...

Crappy ROP count. The Fury line of cards suffering because they have the same ROP count as the the 290/290x.

[Humbug]

Good to finally see this in action. Inb4 AMD and Nvidia lock this in their drivers. More likely though, most devs won't bother to implement this. Not having to get rid of your old graphics card when you upgrade is a very juicy prospect though.

A lot of devs also don't bother with crossfire / SLI optimization because they see the percentage of people with high end GPUs as small, and then the people with dual GPUs as a fraction of that...

[The Benjamins]

The 7970 + 680 works great, while 680 + 7970 is slower. interesting.

 

I want to see some APU (intel or AMD) paired with dGPUs. if you can get some extra frames that would be so cool.

 

[Humbug]

Crappy ROP count. The Fury line of cards suffering because they have the same ROP count as the the 290/290x.

This. It's not the most balanced architecture. Seems like kinda a stopgap for AMD before they release 14nm GPUs. But they wanted to do something in the meanwhile... Since NVIDIA got high end Maxwell out.

[Grrizz]

WOW! Colour me impressed, I didn't think we'd see anything like this till long into DX12s life and even then I thought the first showing would be buggy as all hell (after all both AMD and Nvidia can hardly get CF/SLI right ). Guess its still early days but looking good so early so far!

[ivan134]

A lot of devs also don't bother with crossfire / SLI optimization because they see the percentage of people with high end GPUs as small, and then the people with dual GPUs as a fraction of that...

Yup. The sate of xfire/SLI right now makes this seem like a "when hell freezes over" prospect.

[AlexGoesHigh]

benches that OP dind't post

2560x1440

 

3840x2160 (4K)

4K Frametimes 

 

Old still DX12 complaint hardware

 

Its so damn impressive the performance gains fury x + 980ti have, specially for pre alpha software that still needs lots of optimization, not many games will program this level of EMA into their render pipeline but i hope they at least go the way iGPU + dGPU way which is a more common set up that multi gpu.

[2FA]

Good to finally see this in action. Inb4 AMD and Nvidia lock this in their drivers. More likely though, most devs won't bother to implement this. Not having to get rid of your old graphics card when you upgrade is a very juicy prospect though.

I don't see AMD locking this feature as they are all about compatibility. Nvidia I'm unsure about though.

[Shakaza]

Fury X has more less powerful cores. 290x has 2816 powerful Hawaii cores, still the most powerful AMD has made yet and almost on par with Maxwell in terms of brute performance.

No, I'm pretty sure that's not true. The theoretical FLOPS for both of them across 2816 cores is practically equal, with a small advantage to the Fury X since its clock speed is 50 MHz higher. The R9 290x has 68.75% of the cores of the Fury X, so if you multiply that by the Fury X's maximum of 8602 GFLOPS, you get around 5914 GFLOPS, again a bit above the 290x because of the clock speed increase. If you really want me to show you how to get the same value, multiply the result of 1000/1050 by 5914 to get 5632, the value of the maximum GFLOPS of the 290x.

 

Sources: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2677/radeon-r9-fury-x.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2460/radeon-r9-290x.html

[Razarza]

I hope that there isn't any extra frame latency or any other shit that makes regular multi-GPU setups sometimes unfavourable. It would be awesome if in a few years you could just throw a few video cards into a system no matter the vendor and get mad performance.

[Zah]

Be right back, buying a 390x for my 980ti to SLIFire

[StareX]

it would be cool if you could in DX12 or Vulkan do like GTX 670 + 980 or GTX 560 Ti + 980 Ti .. that would be awesome

[ivan134]

it would be cool if you could in DX12 or Vulkan do like GTX 670 + 980 or GTX 560 Ti + 980 Ti .. that would be awesome

You would need AMD cards for that (7000 series and up) since every GCN card supports at least support dx 12.0. Nothing below Maxwell supports anything more than dx 11.0.

[VagabondWraith]

You would need AMD cards for that (7000 series and up) since every GCN card supports at least support dx 12.0. Nothing below Maxwell supports anything more than dx 11.0.

Not true. Everything from Fermi has at least partial D3D12 support.

[ivan134]

Not true. Everything from Fermi has at least partial D3D12 support.

Kepler (and consequenctly, everything below) does not support dx 11.1, 11.2 or 11.3. They most certainly do not have dx12 support.

[VagabondWraith]

Kepler (and consequenctly, everything below) does not support dx 11.1, 11.2 or 11.3. They most certainly do not have dx12 support.

Yes they do. I'll find a source... on mobile.

[ivan134]

Yes they do. I'll find a source... on mobile.

Good luck.

[StareX]

You would need AMD cards for that (7000 series and up) since every GCN card supports at least support dx 12.0. Nothing below Maxwell supports anything more than dx 11.0.

yeah I guess.. but still that would be epic. aka bridging your old GPU with a new one, resulting in much more performance.. you know.

[VagabondWraith]

Good luck.

Here's 1. If I was on desktop I'd find you 50 more since you're too lazy.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9472/windows-10-launch-day-gpu-support-summary

[VagabondWraith]

Good luck.

Another. Fermi support soon.

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3711/~/which-nvidia-gpus-will-support-dx12%3F

[dimitriianghelov]

does vulkan support this to? i didn't read to much about it