HiGame

Last week, Futuremark released Time Spy, a new DirectX 12 benchmark that takes full advantage of DX12’s features and capabilities, including asynchronous compute. While the release of a new benchmark is typically of modest interest, there’s been a great deal of confusion, uncertainty, and doubt over Time Spy’s benchmark results and what those results mean. Futuremark has since published an updated and expanded guide to how the benchmark functions and what it’s designed to do.

Much of the confusion on this topic is related to what Time Spy tests and how it implements support for asynchronous compute in DirectX 12. A graph from PC Perspective’s test results from last week will illustrate the question:




These results show performance in Time Spy at the benchmark’s default settings with asynchronous compute enabled versus disabled. AMD’s GPUs gain a significant amount of performance, with the RX 480 increasing its score by 8.5% while the R9 Nano and Fury X pick up 11.1% and 12.9% respectively. Nvidia’s Maxwell cards, in contrast, are flat.
Pascal, however, does gain some performance, with the GTX 1070 gaining 5.4% and the GTX 1080 picking up 6.8%. This stands contrary to what we’ve seen in most DX12 benchmarks to date, in which enabling async compute on Nvidia cards either led to a small performance decrease or had no impact on performance at all.

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