Gears of War Ultimate Edition. DX12 exclusive, requirements inside

PrMinisterGR · Mar 1, 2016

Szaby59 said: ↑

The game released today.

There is an early "preview" about the performance it runs good with a 390X but it's a disaster with 4 GB cards: 'Gears of War: Ultimate Edition' On PC Is A Disaster For AMD Radeon Gamers
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It doesn't seem to be a VRAM issue. The NVIDIA 4GB cards would have had the same problems, as well as the 370. Seems to me like the game was released badly. The guy didn't provide any charts or anything (unless I missed them).

SimBy said: ↑

Well it seems 4GB of VRAM is not an issue at all. At least not for AMD.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016...graphics_features_performance/14#.VtWtTSgrLWI

VRAM Usage

VRAM utilization was one of the more interesting aspects of Rise of the Tomb Raider. It appears to be very different depending on what GPU you are running. There is no question this game can consume large amounts of VRAM at the right settings. With the GeForce GTX 980 Ti we maxed out its 6GB of VRAM just at 1440p with No AA and maximum settings. The TITAN X revealed that it was actually using up to 7GB of VRAM for that setting. In fact, when we pushed the TITAN X up to 4K with SSAA it used up to almost 10GB of VRAM.

However, for the AMD Radeon R9 390X utilization was a bit odd when you first see it, never exceeding 4.2GB and remaining "flat" with "Very High" textures and SSAA. We did see the proper decrease in VRAM using lower settings, but the behavior was odd indeed. This didn't seem to negatively impact the video card however. The VRAM is simply managed differently with the Radeon R9 300 series.

The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X kind of backs that statement up since it was able to allocate dynamic VRAM for extra VRAM past its 4GB of dedicated VRAM capacity. We saw up to a 4GB utilization of dynamic VRAM. That allowed the Fury X to keep its 4GB of dedicated VRAM maxed out and then use system RAM for extra storage. In our testing, this did not appear to negatively impact performance. At least we didn't notice anything in terms of choppy framerates or "micro-stutter." The Fury X seems to be using the dynamic VRAM as a cache rather than a direct pool of instant VRAM. This would make sense since it did not cause a performance drain and obviously system RAM is a lot slower than local HBM on the Fury X. If you remember a good while ago that AMD was making claims to this effect, but this is the first time we have actually been able to show results in real world gaming. It is awesome to see some actual validation of these statements a year later. This is what AMD said about this in June of 2015.

Note that HBM and GDDR5 memory sized can’t be directly compared. Think of it like comparing an SSD’s capacity to a mechanical hard drive’s capacity. As long as both capacities are sufficient to hold local data sets, much higher performance can be achieved with HBM, and AMD is hand tuning games to ensure that 4GB will not hold back Fiji’s performance. Note that the graphics driver controls memory allocation, so its incorrect to assume that Game X needs Memory Y. Memory compression, buffer allocations, and caching architectures all impact a game’s memory footprint, and we are tuning to ensure 4GB will always be sufficient for 4K gaming. Main point being that HBM can be thought of as a giant embedded cache, and is not directly comparable to GDDR5 sizes.

Now specifically that statement backs up "4K gaming" and we will give AMD (and NVDIA for that matter) a pass at this moment as neither produce "4K gaming" GPUs. The important statement here is this, "AMD is hand tuning games to ensure that 4GB will not hold back Fiji’s performance." We have said over and over again that this statement by AMD did not ring true in terms of needed HBM capacity, and this is the actually the first time we have seen AMD's statement make sense to us in real world gaming with Triple A titles. So kudos to AMD in being able to show us that this statement has come to fruition finally. The downside we see to this statement is AMD will have to "hand tune" games in order to make this work. What games will get hand tuned in the future? That said, AMD seems to have done an excellent job hand tuning Rise of the Tomb Raider for its HBM architecture.
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This is quite interesting. I wouldn't say it's not an issue, but it's interesting to see how they tackle it in the driver. Hand tuning is not very hopeful, I would prefer if there was an algorithmic solution in place. So, according to HardOCP, the Fury has no problem with the 4GB of HBM in Tomb Raider. Is that true?

PS: I'm probably biased, but seeing results lately I'm starting to believe that the most "uncompromised" design by AMD was GCN 1.0. I can't believe the performance of that 370.

Szaby59 · Mar 1, 2016

The 370 was probably GPU limited for the whole time while the 290x and Fury got the stutters because of the low VRAM amount and the GPU could have been faster.

Ryu5uzaku · Mar 1, 2016

So it is a Tonga/Fiji issue then 380 is Tonga. I wonder what the issue is. Tbh the 4gb ram has not really been issue but the Tonga/Fiji cards have been having odd things in other games like in the new Tomb Raider where Nvidia 4gb cards maintained good min fps Tonga and Fiji suffered.

Szaby59 · Mar 1, 2016

Different architecture, the nVidia GPU's compression or the driver's memory management could be more efficient that's why it can hold longer/with less stutters.

SimBy · Mar 1, 2016

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...-disaster-for-amd-radeon-gamers/#6bb83aed7e7e

https://gearsofwar.com/en-us/forums...es/9aa87281-98f1-4203-aed5-95ddb54420db/posts

Update 3/1/2016 8:38 am PDT: The Coalition Community Manager PezRadar has posted a forum update indicating that all AMD cards using GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 are suffering problems, stating that “AMD is an important partner bringing the promise of DirectX 12 to life for gamers everywhere. We are working closely with them [...]“

The developers also confirm my suspicion about Ambient Occlusion: “There are visual issues with AMD graphics cards and the Ambient Occlusion setting, it is strongly recommended to turn this setting OFF. We are readying a fix to be deployed in the coming days.”

Update 3/1/2016 8:55 am PDT: Though I cannot personally confirm this I’m beginning to hear reports that Nvidia’s 980 Ti is also exhibiting stuttering and hitching issues.

Yet another game released with zero QA. Batman all over again.

Szaby59 · Mar 1, 2016

"GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 are suffering problems"

So basically every "current" AMD card. Still doesn't explain why the 390X had no issues according to the forbes article.

BoMbY · Mar 1, 2016

Probably because the memory management of the game sucks, and it currently needs 8 GB to run smooth.

Noisiv · Mar 1, 2016

980m is nice and smooth, but that could be either 4 or 8GB card

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya3DOZkyhig

BoMbY · Mar 1, 2016

This guy had it not smooth, and 30 FPS, on his 980 Ti.

sTOrM41 · Mar 1, 2016

looks like trash, runs like trash, good job ms.

isidore · Mar 1, 2016

BoMbY said: ↑

This guy had it not smooth, and 30 FPS, on his 980 Ti.
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the game looks really old gen, definitely not going to get it.

Paulo Narciso · Mar 1, 2016

A proof that DX12 won't do any miracles if the Dev behind the game sucks. This is even worse because microsoft is behind dx12 and gears of war

Turanis · Mar 2, 2016

M$ they do it with Windows Store and Xbone in mind.
This game looks like a Xbone console game,mean ugly graphics.

They dont care for PC gaming & windows users.

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Gears of War Ultimate Edition. DX12 exclusive, requirements inside

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