One of the interesting advancements in DirectX 12 is the way it allows graphics cards from different manufacturers to be paired together. Traditionally if you wanted a multiple GPU setup, you had to get two cards from the same manufacturer and often they had to be the same model too.
But DX12 is giving developers much more control over accessing and manipulating GPUs, and one manifestation is the freedom to pair different GPUs. It will still take a few years before the real-world benefits become much more commonplace, but the first benchmarks are in and the results are highly intriguing.
Anandtech has run the figures using Ashes of the Singularity, the real-time strategy game which is becoming synonymous with any mention of DX12 these days (until Fable Legends comes out, anyway).
The tech hub has run a range of combinations on a special build of the game provided by developers Oxide. It’s special because it’s the first version that supports the multi-GPU feature — one of DX12’s two multi-GPU modes, anyway — meaning that you wouldn’t be able to run this through your own system yet.
In any case, the combinations range from the high end to the low end, from a R9 Fury X and a GTX 980 Ti at 4K all the way down to a GTX 680 and a Radeon HD 7970. It’s the low-end benchmarks that I find particularly fascinating, although it’s worth noting that the 2012 GPUs got absolutely smashed when they tried to run Ashes at 2560×1440 (with the GTX 680 being the lead card).
Here’s a video of Ashes running when the R9 Fury is taking the lead with a 980 Ti in tow. Those lasers look pretty.
Comments
4 responses to “The First Tests On DirectX 12 Using NVIDIA And AMD Together Are In”
I’m hoping this means I can add a mid spec AMD card to my GTX980ti and be able to use a Freesync monitor.
Quite a genius idea but I’m stuck with using my Korean monitor that will never have that technology.
Im hoping this means i can add a cheapo NVidia card to my system to take advantage of Phsyx
Just remember kids, AMD and Nvidia both don’t 100% support DX 12 natively yet. So some results will be even, some results might go in the way of Nvidia then another game might go in the way of AMD it all depends on what technology the game developer decides to use and the technology the cards do have implemented.
So if you’re holding on to an old 7970 or 770/680 then I would suggest keeping it until full support is actually in, otherwise some titles might not perform as well as you hoped when in dx12… That doesn’t mean because you have a 970 you’re boned either, as a last resort if a new dx12 game is not performing well at all on your card then simply put it into dx11, just like games today new ones will support multiple version of DirectX i.e DX 11, 10 and some times even 9 still.