Nvidia Maxwell lacks important features in DirectX 12 states Oxide Games

A while ago, the developers Oxide Games released an early alpha version of the strategy game Ashes of the Singularity. The game is first out with support for DirectX 12 and according to the acclaimed test results, it is AMD’s graphics card that has by far the most to gain from a switch to Microsoft’s new performance-optimized graphics interface in Windows 10.

Now the story takes a new turn when Oxide Games points out that AMD’s huge performance gain can at least be partly explained by the fact that Nvidia’s competing graphics architecture Maxwell in practice lacks support for an important feature in DirectX 12, despite Nvidia claiming that this should be available.

Curiously, their driver reported this feature was functional but attempting to use it was an unmitigated disaster in terms of performance and conformance so we shut it down on their hardware. As far as I know, Maxwell doesn’t really have Async Compute so I don’t know why their driver was trying to expose that.

The function is called Async Compute and is used to separate and schedule different types of calculation data, which will streamline the use of system resources. This feature is also predicted to become more significant as game developers invest in squeezing more performance out of game consoles.

NVIDIA claims “full support” for DX12, but conveniently ignores that Maxwell is utterly incapable of performing asynchronous compute without heavy reliance on slow context switching.

On Reddit, AMD takes the opportunity to hand out a pacifier and claims that Nvidia “conveniently enough” forgets to tell you that Maxwell can not perform Async Compute without having problems with delays. For performance reasons, Oxide Games chooses not to use the feature with Geforce series graphics cards, which is also said to be the only manufacturer-specific optimization.

Despite the resurrection, Nvidia is low and has not yet commented on the history of Async Compute. However, in connection with the releases of the first performance tests, Nvidia claimed that Ashes of the Singularity contains several shortcomings and that the test results are not representative of the performance in DirectX 12, something that Oxide Games later rejected.