DirectX 12 Multi-GPU Technology Tested: GeForce and Radeon Paired Together

Previewing DX12 Multi-Adapter with Ashes of the Singularity

Ashes of the Singularity gave u.s. an early peek at how AMD and Nvidia's current GPUs are shaping up for DirectX 12 when we checked out the upcoming real-fourth dimension strategy title last November. Back then our focus was primarily on DX11 vs. DX12 performance and more to the point how Nvidia's Maxwell and AMD's GCN one.2 architectures compared. We also looked at CPU operation which proved to be interesting to look at besides.

Although the final game's release is still pending, we know Stardock has been hard at work as shown by the cool new features in its Ashes of the Singularity benchmark 2.0.

The most notable of them is 'explicit multi-adapter' (EMA), DirectX 12's multi-GPU engineering, which gives game developers precise control over the workloads of their engine and direct control over the resource offered past each GPU in a system.

Rather than the AFR (alternate-frame rendering) method used past DX11, each frame of a game is split into a tile and this method is called SFR (split-frame rendering). SFR tin suspension each frame of a game into multiple smaller tiles, and assign one tile to each GPU in the system. These tiles are rendered in parallel by the GPUs and combined into a completed scene for the user.

Parallel utilise of GPUs reduces return latency to improve FPS and VR responsiveness.

Perhaps the coolest and most unholy feature of EMA is its ability to support both AMD and Nvidia GPUs in the same system. This means it is possible to pair a GeForce GTX 980 Ti with a Radeon R9 Fury Ten for example. This mind blowing feature is what we will exist focusing on today.

Some other advantage of this method is greater retentiveness chapters. Previously multi-GPU configurations in DX9, DX10 and DX11 games were express to a single GPU's worth of VRAM. For example, dual 4GB cards would just equal 4GB. This is because each GPU contains an identical copy of a game'due south data set to ensure synchronization and forbid scene corruption.

DX12's explicit multi-adapter engineering science allows multiple GPUs to combine their retentiveness into a single larger pool. This ways two 4GB cards would essentially have an 8GB retentiveness buffer and this could certainly meliorate the texture fidelity of hereafter games.

The Ashes of the Singularity criterion 2.0 besides makes advanced use of multi-queue and signaling mechanisms, aka asynchronous compute. This is the feature that AMD supports at a hardware level while Nvidia has had to patch it in at the driver level.

As a result, GeForce cards were actually faster when rendering in the DX11 mode, while the opposite was truthful for the Radeon graphics cards. Now with even more than emphasis on async compute it volition be interesting to see how Nvidia'south Maxwell GPUs handle this latest version of Ashes of the Singularity.

Test Organization Specs

Something worth noting is that the Multi GPU mode under DX12 required 16GB of RAM to work, installing less would cause the game to hang when loading and eventually crash to the desktop. The developer says this is considering Multi GPU requires additional RAM due to the way D3D12 shadows texture memory.