Directx 12 and the way CPU requirements are going

[othertomperson]

So yesterday I was browsing some forums and I encountered this guy having performance issues in a certain part of Rise of the Tomb Raider. One of the responses said that the problem was that it's a CPU intensive area and this guy's 6700K was bottlenecking him.

 

My immediate thought was "bullshit". The fastest mainsteam CPU (apart from the near-identical 7700K) shouldn't be bottlenecking a game like this. It's something else.

 

Then I got to the same place.

 

The attachment shows 6 cores with hyperthreading of almost full utilisation of an overclocked 3960X.

 

I mean I stand by my initial assessment, the game shouldn't be using this much CPU resources with this little going on (I'm kind of impressed that it can tbh), but do you think Dx12 will mean more of this? Because game devs can use 12 cores, they are going to stop optimising for 4? After all the consoles have 8 to play with. I may reassess my whole opinion of Ryzen if more Dx12 games end up looking like this -- favouring many cores over faster cores.

 

Have any of you had similar Dx12 experiences? Ashes of the Singularity is an obvious example, but from what I've heard it seems reasonably well optimised for a range of hardware?

[App4that]

This is why I've been saying a i7 is required for a high end graphics card for over a year. I saw the trend. If you're the developer, why put the effort into optimization when the reviewers use the latest enthusiast chip? Developers saved millions in work hours not optimizing in 2016. 

 

But ROTTR is a DX11 to DX12 port, and a bad one at that. Just about worst case scenario. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Why bother optimizing? Because you're potentially alienating your audience. As a publisher I'd rather have the system requirements as low as possible to attract as many people as possible.

 

Also there's no such thing as "optimizing for X number of cores". Either it's well threaded or it's not and the amount of performance boost you get depends on how much you made the code be able to run in parallel. See Amdahl's Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

 

And while consoles have 8 threads to play with, the processor uses a low performance architecture. And it's running at 1.6 or 2.1 GHz. A Pentium can theoretically run circles around it based on the benchmarks with Kabini.

 

Should also point out CPU utilization means how much time the program was spent on the CPU, not its execution resource consumption

Edited January 8, 2017 by M.Yurizaki
Good ol' phone keyboards

[captain cactus]

I remember that a couple of years ago with the G3258. Dual core, no hyperthreading but unlocked and dirt cheap, and it was a hit with gamers on a budget because it could overclock. I feel sorry for those people now, because even though they have the thing running at like 4.6-4.7 GHz it's only a dual-core, and while it works well in older titles and e-sports games like CS:GO (mainly because Source is so old it runs pretty great on low core count CPUs and relies much heavier on the power of a single core) in newer titles they're not getting anywhere, with some games straight up refusing to boot due to a lack of cores.

 

Even today we see i5s (and in this case a top-end i7) being a bottleneck because it "only" has 4 cores. This is why AMD opted for a 4/6/8 core Ryzen CPUs all with SMT instead of a 2/4 core design: they know the gaming industry is shifting from heavily single-threaded workloads (which require a high-performance core design) to multi-threaded operations. It's why they can afford to have a Broadwell-level IPC: they go in with raw core count rather than powerful single cores. 

[App4that]

Powerful cores still matter, you don't see a FX CPU beating a 6600k. 

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, lots of unexplainable lag said:

I remember that a couple of years ago with the G3258. Dual core, no hyperthreading but unlocked and dirt cheap, and it was a hit with gamers on a budget because it could overclock. I feel sorry for those people now, because even though they have the thing running at like 4.6-4.7 GHz it's only a dual-core, and while it works well in older titles and e-sports games like CS:GO (mainly because Source is so old it runs pretty great on low core count CPUs and relies much heavier on the power of a single core) in newer titles they're not getting anywhere, with some games straight up refusing to boot due to a lack of cores.

 

Even today we see i5s (and in this case a top-end i7) being a bottleneck because it "only" has 4 cores. This is why AMD opted for a 4/6/8 core Ryzen CPUs all with SMT instead of a 2/4 core design: they know the gaming industry is shifting from heavily single-threaded workloads (which require a high-performance core design) to multi-threaded operations. It's why they can afford to have a Broadwell-level IPC: they go in with raw core count rather than powerful single cores. 

Its funny how AMD FX CPUs now crush the G3258 which many claims they could not do & would never happen... (I saw this coming since 2014...)

[othertomperson]

14 minutes ago, App4that said:

But ROTTR is a DX11 to DX12 port, and a bad one at that. Just about worst case scenario. 

This hasn't been my experience tbh. It is the first game I have played that is highly graphically demanding, that actually warrants being so. SLI scaling is pretty good too. And as much vram as the game uses, at least the textures are so breathtakingly detailed that actually I can see it being warranted. And I can run it at 4K on a very high (custom) preset and hardly ever drop below 100 fps.

 

This is the first time it's used an extreme amount of resources that's left me scratching my head, but it hasn't actually affected my performance... albeit on a very high end machine.

 

With the talk of FX, I want to see how something like the FX 8350 handles a game this heavily threaded, especially given its price compared to the last two generations of i3.

[App4that]

2 minutes ago, othertomperson said:

This hasn't been my experience tbh. It is the first game I have played that is highly graphically demanding, that actually warrants being so. SLI scaling is pretty good too. And as much vram as the game uses, at least the textures are so breathtakingly detailed that actually I can see it being warranted. And I can run it at 4K on a very high (custom) preset and hardly ever drop below 100 fps.

 

This is the first time it's used an extreme amount of resources that's left me scratching my head, but it hasn't actually affected my performance... albeit on a very high end machine.

Dues Ex has much better SLI scaling, and doesn't suffer from texture flashing. So far ROTTR and BF1 are the worst DX11 to DX12 ports I know of. 

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, App4that said:

Dues Ex has much better SLI scaling, and doesn't suffer from texture flashing. So far ROTTR and BF1 are the worst DX11 to DX12 ports I know of. 

I hope they just dump DX12 and jump on the Vulkan train...

[othertomperson]

1 minute ago, App4that said:

Dues Ex has much better SLI scaling, and doesn't suffer from texture flashing. So far ROTTR and BF1 are the worst DX11 to DX12 ports I know of. 

I haven't experienced texture flashing personally. I'm getting close to 100% scaling in Dx12, too. Single GPU fps is in the 40s, dual GPU is in the 80s.

 

[App4that]

Just now, Nena360 said:

I hope they just dump DX12 and jump on the Vulkan train...

Nothing wrong with DX12. It's the porting over from DX11 giving it a bad name. 

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, App4that said:

Nothing wrong with DX12. It's the porting over from DX11 giving it a bad name. 

Well World of Tanks was ported from DX9 but it got IMPROVED performance not worse!!!

[App4that]

1 minute ago, othertomperson said:

I haven't experienced texture flashing personally. I'm getting close to 100% scaling in Dx12, too. Single GPU fps is in the 40s, dual GPU is in the 80s.

 

Which build are you running? Best I've seen is 39%. 

[othertomperson]

2 minutes ago, App4that said:

Nothing wrong with DX12. It's the porting over from DX11 giving it a bad name. 

I'm inclined to agree, but we need some Dx12 native games to know for sure. I don't see that happening soon, due to 12's Win 10 exclusivity.

 

1 minute ago, Nena360 said:

Well World of Tanks was ported from DX9 but it got IMPROVED performance not worse!!!

Meh I get much higher fps with 12 than 10, particularly with SLI enabled.

 

2 minutes ago, App4that said:

Which build are you running? Best I've seen is 39%. 

 

idk the most recent?

[App4that]

Just now, Nena360 said:

Well World of Tanks was ported from DX9 but it got IMPROVED performance not worse!!!

That's because it was properly ported. 

[App4that]

1 minute ago, othertomperson said:

I'm inclined to agree, but we need some Dx12 native games to know for sure. I don't see that happening soon, due to 12's Win 10 exclusivity.

Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War, both run perfect on my rig. 

[Nena Trinity]

2 minutes ago, App4that said:

That's because it was properly ported. 

Also War Thunder got ported to OpenGL and did not get worse performance unless you had a AMD card tough... o3o

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, App4that said:

Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War, both run perfect on my rig. 

Gears is good in terms of FPS but this teredo cancer pisses me off...

[Gonio]

It just will be a while before DX12 is actually better then DX11 in general, despite the very nice potential it has. In about 2 years orso DX12 support is more mainstream built in instead of added later. Remember that games are currently mostly build on DX11 engines that have added DX12 support later. See it like remastering of movies and shave up the quality. So for now for games I think it's best to stay DX11 since that currently runs better in many cases anyway.

 

For optimizing games for multi threaded: I think that in general the quality is going back last couple of years despite the more and better possibilities out there.

[Nena Trinity]

4 minutes ago, Gonio said:

It just will be a while before DX12 is actually better then DX11 in general, despite the very nice potential it has. In about 2 years orso DX12 support is more mainstream built in instead of added later. Remember that games are currently mostly build on DX11 engines that have added DX12 support later. See it like remastering of movies and shave up the quality. So for now for games I think it's best to stay DX11 since that currently runs better in many cases anyway.

 

For optimizing games for multi threaded: I think that in general the quality is going back last couple of years despite the more and better possibilities out there.

I feel that few games did DX12 right, Ashes and Gears are great tough!

[Morgan MLGman]

18 minutes ago, App4that said:

Powerful cores still matter, you don't see a FX CPU beating a 6600k. 

Oh let's hope that will change in under 4 months! (From what I researched, AMD should release Ryzen before the end of March, Vega is due first half of this year)

[xAcid9]

 Right after AOTS DX12 benchmark.

 

 

61FPS average on Extreme 1080p preset.

[captain cactus]

15 minutes ago, App4that said:

Nothing wrong with DX12. It's the porting over from DX11 giving it a bad name. 

Windows 10 exclusive.

 

That's where it's wrong.

[App4that]

1 minute ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Oh let's hope that will change in under 4 months! (From what I researched, AMD should release Ryzen before the end of March, Vega is due first half of this year)

I'm not exactly optimistic. Side topic but AMD has done nothing to show the single thread performance has improved over even Haswell with Ryzen. The features of the Ryzen platform are abysmal. AMD needs that single thread performance to compete if the features aren't there, and they're not. 

[App4that]

1 minute ago, lots of unexplainable lag said:

Windows 10 exclusive.

 

That's where it's wrong.

Why?