GeForce + Radeon: Previewing DirectX 12 Multi-Adapter with Ashes of the Singularity
by Ryan Smith on October 26, 2015 10:00 AM EST
Throughout this year we’ve looked at several previews and technical demos of DirectX 12 technologies, both before and after the launch of Windows 10 in July. As the most significant update to the DirectX API since DirectX 10 in 2007, the release of DirectX 12 marks the beginning of a major overhaul of how developers will program for modern GPUs. So to say there’s quite a bit of interest in it – both from consumers and developers – would be an understatement.
In putting together the DirectX 12 specification, Microsoft and their partners planned for the long haul, present and future. DirectX 12 has a number of immediately useful features in it that has developers grinning from ear to ear, but at the same time given the fact that another transition like this will not happen for many years (if at all), DirectX 12 and the update to the underlying display driver foundation were meant to be very forward looking and to pack in as many advanced features as would be reasonable. Consequently the first retail games such as this quarter’s Fable Legends will just scratch the surface of what the API can do, as developers are still in the process of understanding the API and writing new engines around it, and GPU driver developers are similarly still hammering out their code and improving their DirectX 12 functionality.
Of everything that has been written about DirectX 12 so far, the bulk of the focus has been on the immediate benefits of the low-level nature of the API, and this is for a good reason. The greatly reduced driver overhead and better ability to spread out work submission over multiple CPU cores stands to be extremely useful for game developers, especially as the CPU submission bottleneck is among the greatest bottlenecks facing GPUs today. Even then, taking full advantage of this functionality will take some time as developers have become accustomed to minimizing the use of draw calls to work around the bottleneck, so it is safe to say that we are at the start of what is going to be a long transition for gamers and game developers.
A little farther out on the horizon than the driver overhead improvements are DirectX 12’s improvements to multi-GPU functionality. Traditionally the domain of drivers – developers have little control under DirectX 11 – DirectX 12’s explicit controls extend to multi-GPU rendering as well. It is now up to developers to decide if they want to use multiple GPUs and how they want to use them. And with explicit control over the GPUs along with the deep understanding that only a game’s developer can have for the layout of their rendering pipeline, DirectX 12 gives developers the freedom to do things that could never be done before.
That brings us to today’s article, an initial look into the multi-GPU capabilities of DirectX 12. Developer Oxide Games, who is responsible for the popular Star Swarm demo we looked at earlier this year, has taken the underlying Nitrous engine and are ramping up for the 2016 release of the first retail game using the engine, Ashes of the Singularity. As part of their ongoing efforts to Nitrous as a testbed for DirectX 12 technologies and in conjunction with last week’s Steam Early Access release of the game, Oxide has sent over a very special build of Ashes.
What makes this build so special is that it’s the first game demo for DirectX 12’s multi-GPU Explicit Multi-Adapter (AKA Multi Display Adapter) functionality. We’ll go into a bit more on Explicit Multi-Adapter in a bit, but in short it is one of DirectX 12’s two multi-GPU modes, and thanks to the explicit controls offered by the API, allows for disparate GPUs to be paired up. More than SLI and more than Crossfire, EMA allows for dissimilar GPUs to be used in conjunction with each other, and productively at that.
So in an article only fitting for the week of Halloween, today we will be combining NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon cards into a single system – a single rendering setup – to see how well Oxide’s early implementation of the technology works. It may be unnatural and perhaps even a bit unholy, but there’s something undeniably awesome about watching a single game rendered by two dissimilar cards in this fashion.
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andrew_pz - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
Radeon placed in 16x slot, GeFroce installed to 4x slot only. WHY?It's cheat!
silverblue - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
There isn't a 4x slot on that board. To quote the specs..."- 4 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots (PCIE1/PCIE2/PCIE4/PCIE5: x16/8/16/0 mode or x16/8/8/8 mode)"
Even if the GeForce was in an 8x slot, I really doubt it would've made a difference.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Aye. And just to be clear here, both cards are in x16 slots (we're not using tri-8 mode).brucek2 - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
The vast majority of PCs, and 100% of consoles, are single GPU (or less.) Therefore developers absolutely must ensure their game can run satisfactorily on one GPU, and have very little to gain from investing extra work in enabling multi GPU support.To me this suggests that moving the burden of enabling multi-gpu support from hardware sellers (who can benefit from selling more cards) to game publishers (who basically have no real way to benefit at all) is that the only sane decision is not invest any additional development or testing on multi gpu support and that therefore multi GPU support will effectively be dead in the DX12 world.
What am I missing?
willgart - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
well... you no longer need to change your card to a big one, you can just upgrade your pc with a low or middle entry card to get a good boost! and you keep your old one. from a long term point of view we win, not the hardware resellers.imagine today you have a GTX970, in 4 years you can get a GTX 2970 and have a stronger system than a single 2980 card... specialy the FPS / $ is very interesting.
and when you compare the setup HD7970+GTX680, maybe the cost is 100$ today(?) can be compared to a single GTX980 which cost nearly 700$...
brucek2 - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
I understand the benefit to the user. What I'm worried is missing is incentive to the game developer. For them the new arrangement sounds like nothing but extra cost and likely extra technical support hassle to make multi-gpu work. Why would they bother? To use your example of a user with 7970+680, the 680 alone would at least meet the console-equivalent setting, so they'd probably just tell you to use that.)prtskg - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
It would make their game run better and thus improve their brand name.brucek2 - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Making it run "better" implies it runs "worse" for the 95%+ of PC users (and 100% of console users) who do not have multi-GPU. That's a non-starter. The publisher has to make it a good experience for the overwhelmingly common case of single gpu or they're not going to be in business for very long. Once they've done that, what they are left with is the option to spend more of their own dollars so that a very tiny fraction of users can play the same game at higher graphics settings. Hard to see how that's going to improve their brand name more than virtually anything else they'd choose to spend that money on, and certainly not for the vast majority of users who will never see or know about it.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
You're not missing anything at all. Multi-GPU systems, at least in the case of there being more than one discrete GPU, represent a small number of halo desktop computers. Desktops, gaming desktops in particular, are already a shrinking market and even the large majority of such systems contain only a single graphics card. This means there's minimal incentive for a developer of a game to bother soaking up the additional cost of adding support for multi GPU systems. As developers are already cost-sensitive and working in a highly competitive business landscape, it seems highly unlikely that they'll be willing to invest the human resources in the additional code or soak up the risks associated with bugs and/or poor performance. In essence, DX12 seems poised to end multi GPU gaming UNLESS the dGPU + iGPU market is large enough in modern computers AND the performance benefits realized are worth the cost to the developers to write code for it. There are, after all, a lot more computers (even laptops and a very limited number of tablets) that contain an Intel graphics processor and an NV or more rarely an AMD dGPU. Though even then, I'd hazard a guess to say that the performance improvement is minimal and not worth the trouble. Plus most computers sold contain only whatever Intel happens to throw onto the CPU die so even that scenario is of limited benefit in a world of mostly integrated graphics processors.mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, October 28, 2015 - link
Any idea what LucidLogix are doing these days?Last i remember, they had released some software solutions which reduced battery drain on Samsung devices (by dynamically decreasing the game rendering quality