Early DirectX 12 benchmarks make good reading for AMD

An early look at the performance of DirectX 12 games on PC suggests that while AMD users will see some dramatic gains, the story isn’t quite as rosy for Nvidia.

AMD has been languishing behind Nvidia in terms of both performance and popularity for quite some time, but PC Perspective reports that an early release of a new benchmarking game called The Ashes of the Singularity offered up some surprising results.

It found that while Nvidia’s GTX 980 would outperform AMD’s Radeon R9 390X using the DX11 renderer, the pair were more or less even under DX12, with the Radeon enjoying a leap in performance. Nvidia’s card, however, often performed worse when using DX12.

Nvidia has via a statement on DSOG tried to downplay the significance of the results.

"The alpha benchmark will run a series of pre-selected scenes and will give you a score at the end to show how well your system ran that series of scenes,” it said. The game looks intriguing, but this alpha benchmark is primarily useful to understand how your system runs a series of scenes from the alpha version of Ashes of Singularity.

"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."