This is a follow-up to my previous thread "DirectX 12 is a game-changer for PC enthusiasts and AMD in particular" :: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=202594&page=1 .
Basically AMD was faced several challenges during the DX11 era. Firstly its video drivers were not multi-threaded which hampered performance in comparison to Nvidia. This was made worse on AMDs own CPUs which have relatively poor single core performance. DX12 gave AMD a chance to start on a clean slate with new threaded drivers/architecture and renewed emphasis on lowering CPU overhead.
Initial benchmarks showed AMD GPUs (290) hitting peak draw calls not far from Nvidia's flagship at the time (Titan X) (13,474,728 vs 13,419,183 million draw calls per second.). Now with a DX12 benchmark on the market everything seems to have gone full circle and AMD seems to have delivered. Its GPUs seem to be performing much better than Nvidia's in a brand new DX12 benchmark. Granted we will need more games and benchmarks for a difinitive conclusion but so far things are looking good for team reds GPUs.
"Our results paint quite a picture: on the one hand, we see some phenomenal gains on the AMD side, while on the other, Nvidia performance looks somewhat underwhelming. This has provoked a polite exchange of words highlighting a difference in opinion between the GPU vendor and the developer, and Nvidia has even distributed its own 'reviewer's guide' for the benchmark to the press."
Note :: AMD still gets destroyed in the DX11 benchmark
"However, even with the v-sync limitation, the results are something of a revelation with the R9 390. Average frame-rates with the Core i3 processor rise from 24fps to 40fps - a 67 per cent boost to performance. On top of that, even the i7 sees a big increase - rising from an average of just 28fps up to 49fps, a 75 per cent uplift. In both cases, lowest recorded frame-rates double - from 12 to 29fps on the i3 and from 15 to 32fps on the i7. But probably the biggest takeaway from the graph is that the i3 running DX12 is significantly outperforming the i7 on DX11 with the same GPU running the same game at the same settings."
"So the question is, where does Nvidia stand here in terms of DX12 performance? Well, at the moment, this is an area of controversy. While there are some gains seen on the i3 side of things when paired with a GTX 970, we actually saw a drop in overall performance on the i7 - DX11 actually runs around 14 per cent slower here. Suffice to say, the R9 390 is significantly faster in DX12 (13 per cent on the i7, 4 per cent on the i3) than the Nvidia card in DX12 mode. The green team's in-house testing - contained in its reviewer's guide and run on a six-core Core i7 5930K running at 3.5GHz - also sees a significant drop, though curiously, results vs DX11 improve when clock-speed is dropped down to 2.0GHz."
"We believe there will be better examples of true DirectX 12 performance and we continue to work with Microsoft on their DX12 API, games and benchmarks. The GeForce architecture and drivers for DX12 performance is second to none - when accurate DX12 metrics arrive, the story will be the same as it was for DX11."
"With regards Nvidia's puzzling performance, we were hoping that looking at performance in context with our tools would help, but the results we were able to glean defy our best attempts at analysis. Quite frankly, the notion of DX12 running slower than DX11 in some scenarios isn't what we expected to see. Whether it's a game-specific issue, or a driver-related one, you can be sure that Nvidia's engineering team are digging deep into this benchmark now in an effort to figure out what's going on. We'll update with any news."
Full article here :: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-ashes-of-the-singularity-dx12-benchmark-tested
More juicy bits here :: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/212314-directx-12-arrives-at-last-with-ashes-of-the-singularity-amd-and-nvidia-go-head-to-head