I want to be honest, I’m not satisfied with the performance of UE4. All my testers always run into a CPU limit, no matter if they own a 2500k or a heavily overclocked 8370. Both examples are still more powerful then what an average gamer owns, and my testers can not even keep a 60 FPS after weeks of optimization.
Seeing games and engines in general gain 20, 30% or even more on DX12 and Vulkan, this makes me incredible envious. The UE4 DX12 “Wrapper” is simply terrible and nothing but a bad marketing gag. Are there any updates in the near future which will address this missing state-of-the-art feature in almost 2017 for UE4?
well it’s good that the competition makes such strives and advancements, hopefully Epic will take note and put some more effort in it
however,
how would a good DX12 or Vulkan implementation help you with this? if your game’s bottleneck is the CPU there’s not much that a faster graphics API can do for you
[edit]
also I’d take that “up to 60% performance” claim with a grain of salt. these kinds of claims are usually measured from best-case scenarios (hence the “up to”)
then if you click the link it sends you to a video of a live presentation and in the slide you can read “performance improvement up to 30 - 60%” :eek:
Modern graphics API’s are optimizations for CPU usage. They usually don’t help much for the GPU part. Old driver models have to do great amount of redudant state checks and lot of guess work how the user is using GPU. But modern API’s make this more explicit so driver does not need to make these slow checks anymore.
That. And this is specially crippling on CPUs with slow IPC as well as AMD GPUs with a bit more driver overhead then Nvidia drivers. Baiscally crippling 35% of all users.
Edit: Since it is not clear to some people:
The new APIs DX12 and Vulkan do reduce the CPU overhead dramatically compared to the almost 6 years old DX11, which enables mid-end systems to utilize much more available GPU resources what otherwise would not be possible due to a CPU limit - which is exactly what most of my testers describe in their feedback.
Thanks! But let me clarify again without any saltiness.
We need Performance, in short a dramatic reduction of CPU-related overhead - the GPU performance of UE4 is excellent compared to other engines. I know drawcalls are only a problem of the actual implementation, and not just engine based, but i also know it can be reduced, limited, adjusted in the backend. That is “the” benefit of DX12/Vulkan and it finally would make UE usable for midrange systems.
You may use Titans to evaluate, but >90% use end-user GPUs which are about 50% (or even more) slower, not to mention the average CPU (what was it again … slightly below an 2500k i5), dont. There are even some old threads in the forums of AMD CPU users. I know these are not popular these days, but they do offer great multicore support even back then - and somehow with their 28nm arch they still keep up with recent Intel CPUs in well optimized engines like frostbite (see BF1, the latest FX is less then 10% behind a i7 6700k, but in UE4 this CPU would bottleneck, delivering not even half of the performance). That is why you see 100x more ArchViz projects then actual games. And those we saw (ARK) are known to perform rather terrible, even with enthusiast grade hardware.
I hope i could clarify my point a bit better now, considering the great reaction of … well … the community manager.
Have a wonderful christmas!
DX12 does have minimum hardware requirements though as Windows 10 actually has a minimum mobo needed to run the OS (which also comes with its own overhead over Win7).
In my tests of Doom on Vulkan (running Win7 on an i5 Ivy Bridge) I actually received no benefits what so ever, the game isnt CPU bound its GPU bound as are lots of games so you’ll still quickly reach the limits of your GPU if its as old as those CPUs.
I havent been able to find much info on Vulkan in Unity, most of the stuff Ive seen is marketing hype and doesnt go into specifics like which Shader Model level it supports, if it goes all the way up to SM5 as UE4 does support Vulkan up to SM4. Its quite possible Unitys implementation is limited too, Im just not sure, it does look like they support Vulkan on PC for SM5 but it would be nice if they didnt hide pertinent information behind hype especially in regards to GDC (not really a press event).
Ive actually seen very few games fully utilize DX11 to its full potential because of the focus on consoles and mobile, thats not to say the OP is wrong just that DX11 is actually 6 years younger than Sandy Bridge.
I would prefer to see Vulkan support SM5+ (in UE4) over DX12 myself because of Microsofts tightening grip on their ecosystem, it actually has nothing to do with Unity at all tbh!
please let us know if you have more as well