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AMD quantifies DirectX 12 performance boost with new 3DMark API Overhead feature test

By Koh Wanzi - on 30 Mar 2015, 5:04pm

AMD quantifies DirectX 12 performance boost with new 3DMark API Overhead feature test

The 3DMark Overhead feature test renders increasing numbers of building-like objects on screen. (Image Source: Futuremark)

AMD has released results of Futuremark’s new 3DMark API Overhead feature test to demonstrate the potential performance gains of DirectX 12 on its own hardware. New APIs like DirectX 12 enable lower performance overheads by allowing games to make better use of multi-core CPUs and removing software bottlenecks when it comes to CPU draw calls, which consist of the CPU telling the GPU to draw an object on the screen.

The 3DMark API Overhead feature test is the world’s first independent test designed to measure differences in DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and Mantle API performance. However, unlike benchmarks such as 3DMark Fire Strike, which measures performance between different systems, the 3DMark API Overhead feature test will compare the relative performance of different graphics APIs on the same system.

According to figures released by AMD, DirectX 12 enabled almost 16 times more draw calls on the AMD Radeon R9 290X. That’s an increase from under 2.5 million draw calls per second to almost 20 million. It’s not only the top-performing cards that see improvements, and the AMD Radeon R7 260X posted a 10 times increase in draw calls per second when moving from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12. Of course, it’s important to note that you probably won’t see improvements of this magnitude when it comes to frame rates in game, but the huge improvement in draw calls allows the graphics engine to draw more objects, textures, and effects to the screen.

Image Source: AMD

The company also showed significant improvement in performance-per-watt on PCs. It ran the test on the AMD A10-7850K APU, and found around a 6-fold increase in draw calls per second with DirectX 12 at around the same power draw. This represents a marked improvement in power efficiency, something that has the potential to impact the role of low-power SoCs in games going forward.

Image Source: AMD

Finally, AMD broke out the eight-core AMD FX-8350 to illustrate DirectX 12’s improvements in utilizing multi-core CPUs. Gamers today find little performance benefit when moving from an Intel Core i5 to Core i7 processor because few games are optimized to make use of multiple cores, but a new feature called multi-threaded command buffer recording looks to change that. It allows multi-core communication that scales according to the number of CPU cores. This can be seen from the graph below, which shows no benefit with increasing core count on DirectX 11, but an appreciable benefit moving from two cores to six on DirectX 12. This is good news for developers who will now be able to fully utilize the computing resources of modern multi-core CPUs, which means greater freedom to ramp up the graphics or make games less demanding and hence more accessible.

Image Source: AMD

There’s also scarce mention of Mantle, AMD’s own next-generation API, which means the company is indeed throwing its weight behind DirectX 12 as the way forward in game development. 

Source: AMD

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