AMD Mantle API [updating]

And FC4 seems to have problems even on Nvidia hardware...


He just updated his computer with the latest Intel CPU and dual 780s and gets annoying slowdowns randomly while driving or even moving around. And before the FC4 patch and latest Nvidia beta drivers performance was incredibly bad on his 780s.

Apparently he's also had problems with AC: Unity on his 780s.

I'd just chalk this one up to the UBIsoft teams just being bad (or maybe just Gameworks being bad? Just kidding...). They just happen to be less bad on Nvidia hardware.

Regards,
SB
 
Jawed said:
Hawaii has 8 ACEs. Anyone studied the effect of AMD GPUs which have only 2 ACEs (most of the HD7000/R200 cards) versus those with 8?
Click to expand...

You mean the impact with AC and FC4 ? Well tesselation is for now not implemented in AC ( Gamework nvidia tesselation ) and for other " geometry"part it will be hard to check it ( untill someone use a proper software for analyze it if possible ).For both games, its maybe needed too to fix all performance bug before check anything.

For COD, well i dont think the game have particular troughput on this sense. but it can be interessant to check if the CPU spikes could be caused by this. ( i suspect more there's a bug in the engine who cause the spikes on usage something who should be fixed by working on the driver and optimization on AMD gpu's )

Anyway, its crazy how every last UBIsoft games developped this way are running so bad and get terrible launch. I know many owners of thoses games, who start to fix the game how they can by "edit" config files etc. But for casual gamers, i dont see them starting to do this.

But well maybe not the right thread for this discussion no ?
 
DavidGraham said:
Two multi-platform titles are showing -what I think could be- signs of less efficient AMD DX11 drivers, ACU and COD AW.

Ubi shifted the blame on AMD for bad ACU performance on their GPUs, AMD fired back with a statement stating the game is overloading DX11 with draw calls.

"The game (in its current state) is issuing approximately 50,000 draw calls on the DirectX 11 API. Problem is, DX11 is only equipped to handle ~10,000 peak draw calls. What happens after that is a severe bottleneck with most draw calls culled or incorrectly rendered, resulting in texture/NPCs popping all over the place. On the other hand, consoles have to-the-metal access and almost non-existent API Overhead but significantly underpowered hardware which is not able to cope with the stress of the multitude of polygons. Simply put, its a very very bad port for the PC Platform and an unoptimized (some would even go as far as saying, unfinished) title on the consoles".

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/41110...n-s-creed-unity-s-poor-performance/index.html

However NV is handling the same load much better than AMD, (and thus providing much higher performance), likely owing to it's much better DX11 drivers.

DF found that COD AW caused much higher CPU load with AMD cards, than NVIDIA, necessitating the use of more powerful CPUs with AMD GPUs:


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-pc-performance

The same behavior is noticed with ACU too:


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-assassins-creed-unity-face-off

I can't draw solid conclusions from this, but I am inclined to think this can't be a coincidence, though the whole thing is open for discussion.
Click to expand...

This seems like a pretty valid theory to me. We've been being told for ages now my multiple reliable sources that PC's are going to hit a draw call wall this generatio with DX11. Now all of a sudden we seeing next gen games that while they perform well enough at console settings/frame rates, once you start to go beyond that they won't scale very well at all. The bottleneck hs got to be somewhere and since we've seen petty good CPU threading in these Games (see GameGPU's review of ACU for example) I don;t think it's on the CPU side. And it's obviously not the GU sine they're naturally scaleable. That really only leaves the driver/DX.

So put that together with what AMD are saying here, plus the opimisations NV made to their DX11 drivers and the higher CPU requiremens of AMD GPU's (just like we'd expect) then this reall starts to make a lot of sense.

Additionally it could explain the 30fps caps that devlopers have been playing around with on PC games lately. Rather than them just being "lazy console ports" this could simply be down to DX11 being able to handle the draw call requirements of 30fps for a a given game workload(presumably because the devs designed the game within that limitation) but not able to handle much higher than that. So they figure - cap the game at 30fps to avoid these claims of scaling issues due to bad porting. Of course he other option would be to reduce elements of the PC game in comparison to the console game to reduce draw call requirements and thus pressure on DX or to simply scale back all versions of the game to account for PC gamers ith high end hardware, neither of which sound preferable to me.

If this is true it seem to me like PC gamers are just going to have to suck it up as a limitation of the platform untl DX12 comes to save the day (2 years until that really gets traction) or Mantle adoption takes off (never). In the mean time we should lock at 30fps and hope the dvs give us lots mor eye candy to stress high end setups rather that relying on higher frame rates whih DX11 will no longer allow us to hit anyway. I'd prfer the eye candy anyway personally.

And in that context you could consider ACU one of the best PC ports out there sine the core graphics are probably further beyond the console standard (at least when the Tessellation patch arrives) than any other game to date. At max everything even a 980 will struggle to lock it at 30fps and that to my mind is the perfect scenario.

Of course the proof of the pudding will be when we see a game in this same situation that also has Mantle support. That will be an interesting showcase for Mantle indeed.
 
I played Far Cry 4 a bit last night. It runs very well mostly, but when driving around it does noticeably hitch sometimes for no apparent reason. This is on a pretty fast computer (3770K, GTX970, 16GB DDR3, game installed on Intel SSD) with the latest NV driver, all settings max 1080p 4xTXAA vsync off. Lowering to 2xTXAA or SMAA doesn't help, though it does increase overall fps. It's not so bad as to make me stop playing the game, but it's definitely annoying.

FWIW it doesn't seem like a draw call issue to me. That would simply result in low fps, not the weird stuttering that I see.

Oh I will try this supposed fix tonight.
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/954531-EASY-FIX-Stutter-Frame-Skipping-Far-Cry-4
 
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Dave Baumann said:
They had a change of heart.
Click to expand...
That's not a change of heart, it's just apologetic bullshit for being honest. Of course they would want to do some AMD specific performance tweaking, isn't that what you would want? That post just reads "we weren't supposed to single out AMD as the forum warriors are in an uproar and apparently we're supposed to save face. Since we have a partnership with Nvidia, most of the performance optimization went that way duh, so now that the game is released we'll start returning AMD's emails"
 
I... do not understand: today's console has excellent tools to monitor performance analysis. Same on PC (but I suppose it is developed on NVIDIA cards, so most of the time tests run on it).

If they really did 50k drawcalls in windows and the limit is 10k, it means they did not even run a profiler tool - that's impossible.
I do really hope for some insight on the event, looks so cool to follow =)
...especially on console part, the fkup on PS4 with more CU is nice :)
 
Malo said:
That's not a change of heart, it's just apologetic bullshit for being honest. Of course they would want to do some AMD specific performance tweaking, isn't that what you would want? That post just reads "we weren't supposed to single out AMD as the forum warriors are in an uproar and apparently we're supposed to save face. Since we have a partnership with Nvidia, most of the performance optimization went that way duh, so now that the game is released we'll start returning AMD's emails"
Click to expand...

ACU actually runs like complete crap on Nvidia GPUs aswell. But thats just one of many problems with the game. Watch TBs rant about it on Youtube.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
And FC4 seems to have problems even on Nvidia hardware...

He just updated his computer with the latest Intel CPU and dual 780s and gets annoying slowdowns randomly while driving or even moving around. And before the FC4 patch and latest Nvidia beta drivers performance was incredibly bad on his 780s.
Click to expand...
SimBy said:
ACU actually runs like complete crap on Nvidia GPUs aswell. But thats just one of many problems with the game. Watch TBs rant about it on Youtube.
Click to expand...
HOCP did a piece on this, apparently Dual GPUs have multiple problems, SLI (stuttering, visual corruption), CF(completely broken), single GPUs are good mostly, AMD however are suffering extensive stutters and are taking a bigger hit with GameWorks effects. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/11/21/far_cry_4_video_card_performance_iq_preview/3#.VG-3abtxlXE

However FC4 is beside the point, we are talking about the need for higher CPU resources with AMD GPUs in ACU and COD AW, and to my knowledge FC4 doesn't suffer this same problem

Dave Baumann said:
They had a change of heart.
Click to expand...
Obvious PR talks, I wonder if you guys changed your stance as well? (concerning the overwhelming number of draw calls).
pjbliverpool said:
So put that together with what AMD are saying here, plus the opimisations NV made to their DX11 drivers and the higher CPU requiremens of AMD GPU's (just like we'd expect) then this reall starts to make a lot of sense.
Click to expand...
Exactly.
 
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DavidGraham said:
However FC4 is beside the point, we are talking about the need for higher CPU resources with AMD GPUs in ACU and COD AW, and to my knowledge FC4 doesn't suffer this same problem

Exactly.
Click to expand...

i think separate COD And ACU can be a good idea too. I will completely separate the CPU spikes / and so related gpu framerates on COD and the drawcall question... It is absolutely impossible than COD ask for a lot of drawcall. In reality i dont know what the reason of this cpu usage, but im sure it could be fixed anytime by the developpers if they investigate it.
But effectively maybe Nvidia have too been able to optimize the overhead of their driver further on COD.

As for ACU ... well.... lets them fix this game first.. Its the problem with all thoses released games from UBI, today 2 in follow can be put as the worst launch game of thoses last years ( whatever is the brand of your gpu, cpu ).. I dont know if it is linked to Nvidia and gameworks, but well.. good job to UBI.

I was just read a review of FC4 by a really well known Game site:
Excellent game, excellent graphic quality, but unplayable on his pc, bad optimization, result: 7/20 Do not buy.. Maybe after all this, UBI will start to watch things differently and finalize his games before release them. ( I think the day they announce they are delay the release of the game of 2 months, nobody will take it bad )
 
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I've been playing FC4 on a 2500K with 2GB 6970 and it runs quite well at High + 1080p but it does stutter fairly continuously while roaming. Still, most open world games like this stutter. Far Cry 3 stutters. Skyrim stutters. Etc.

I found a post about setting Max Buffered Frames to 1 instead of the default of 0 in the XML configure file (in MyDocs). This may have helped a bit. Some other people are changing a mipmap setting and seeing a great improvement but this drops texture detail. I doubt the complaints will stop unless it runs flawlessly smooth like a corridor shooter. The man child bitching about it being unplayable is ridiculous.

I actually have a GTX 970 in my TVPC but haven't sat down there to try it yet.
 
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Malo said:
Is it installed on a HDD or an SSD?
Click to expand...
I'm using Intel Smart Response. It's on a HDD with SSD cache.

I've tried disabling the caching but that doesn't seem to change anything. It just seems like whenever it needs to stream of the drive there will be a bit of hitching.
 
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Jawed said:
Hawaii has 8 ACEs. Anyone studied the effect of AMD GPUs which have only 2 ACEs (most of the HD7000/R200 cards) versus those with 8?
Click to expand...
PC DirectX 11 (or OpenGL compute) do not support multiple asynchronous compute queues.

Hopefully OpenGL 5.0 and DirectX 12 will introduce the support, allowing us finally fully utilize the modern GPUs on PC. Currently the only way to take advantage of multiple compute queues of the modern NVIDIA and AMD GPUs is to use CUDA or OpenCL (or Mantle?, I don't know). There are not many games that use CUDA or OpenCL. The higher number of ACEs helps in some CUDA / OpenCL compute tasks (mostly it improves the convenience when running multiple libraries concurrently). I didn't find any proper benchmarks links, but there's at least some performance discussion in the AMD developer forums about the performance of multiple queues: http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1279083. AMD seem to recommend that you use multiple queues maximize the GPU utilization.
 
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