We've been bugging AMD for years now, literally, to show us what GPU-accelerated software can do. Finally, the company is ready to put us in touch with ISVs in nine different segments to demonstrate how its hardware can benefit optimized applications.
It seems like only a few months ago that the crew here at at Tom’s Hardware started approaching hardware vendors and software developers with our desire to more thoroughly evaluate the capabilities of OpenCL- and DirectCompute-capable components using real-world metrics. We've gone into as much depth as possible, but there just didn't seem to be much to report on. Sure, we'd run tests in Metro 2033 with its DirectCompute-based depth of field filter turned on and off. But the only conclusion we could draw was, "Wow, that sure hammers performance."
Finally, that situation is changing. A growing roster of games now implements DirectCompute. We're testing four of them in this piece: Battlefield 3, DiRT 3, Civilization 5, and of course, Metro 2033. Unlike most of the game testing we do at Tom’s Hardware, our focus here is not on raw system or component performance. Yes, this is another piece AMD helped us put together with technical insight and help talking to developers, so we're looking at the company's APUs and comparing them to discrete graphics. But there is more to this story than frame rate impact. It’s about enabling techniques for achieving realism that were previously infeasible in the days before GPU-based compute assistance.
“Getting more speed in games based purely on hardware revisions is not reaching the same sort of lofty heights we’ve seen in many years past,” says Neal Robison, director of ISV relationships at AMD. “Software developers typically didn’t have to recode their software because advancements in the hardware would give them an uplift that was, in many cases, double the performance of the previous generation. But now it’s getting to the point where we’re adding cores rather than beefing up the individual chips. Developers actually have to make some changes to their software—in some cases fundamental architectural changes. Heterogeneous compute is one of those keys that will allow you as a developer to literally get at the guts of the processor and make that giant leap forward with your software to encourage folks to upgrade.”
Robison's assessment of what developers will do with heterogeneous computing seems spot on when it comes to applications like Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5 (specifically, its CUDA-enabled Mercury Playback Engine) and video transcoding. Both parallelized workloads readily take advantage of optimizations for graphics architectures. However, we haven't yet seen a performance-oriented benefit attributable to OpenCL or DirectCompute in games. There, both APIs seem to be enabling software developers with new approaches to augmenting reality. We're still curious, though: how, exactly, are the top titles exploiting the latest in heterogeneous computing, and what's to come moving forward? Answering those questions requires developer feedback, and that's exactly what we sought out.
Before we go there, let's take a quick second to talk about performance. As we just saw last week in Battle At $140: Can An APU Beat An Intel CPU And Add-In Graphics?, there are well-defined limits to what you can expect out of today's APUs. We ran Metro. We ran Battlefield. We ran DiRT 3. In each case, these forward-looking games were moderately playable at 1024x768 using their lowest detail settings. Leaning harder on graphics resources for processing OpenCL or DirectCompute isn't going to change that story. More likely is that you'll get an opportunity to play a favorite game on an APU-equipped laptop that wouldn't have run smoothly previously.
But remember that we're a couple of months away from a new wave of CPUs from Intel and Trinity-based APUs from AMD. The performance bar is about to rise, and proper support for both compute standards will almost certainly affect the way your favorite title looks, providing both companies can demonstrate to us higher frame rates from their next-gen parts.
- GPGPU Gets Another Practical Application
- DirectCompute Helps Enable Ambient Occlusion
- Ambient Occlusion, Continued
- What We Tested: Battlefield 3
- What We Tested: Other Apps And Test Config
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 At 1920x1080
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 At 1280x768
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: Civilization 5
- GPU Compute In Games: A Work In Progress

THAT. F.... FENCE.
Every, single, time. With every, single Source game. HL2, CSS, MODS, CSGO. It's everywhere.
Ha. Seriously! The source engine is what I like to call a polished turd. Somehow even though its ugly as f%$#, they still make it look acceptable...except for the fence XD
It’s unnecessary for games to emulate camera flaws, and depth of field is a limitation of cameras. The human eye is able to focus everywhere, and free to do that. Depth of field does not allow to focus where the user wants to focus, so is just an annoyance, and worse, it costs FPS.
This chart is great. Thanks for showing it.
It shows something out of many video cards reviews: the 7970 frequently falls under 50, 40, and even 20 FPS. That ruins the user experience. Meanwhile is hard to tell the difference between 70 and 80 FPS, is easy to spot those moments on which the card falls under 20 FPS. It’s a show stopper, and utter annoyance to spend a lot of money on the most expensive cards and then see thos 20 FPS moments.
That’s why I prefer TechPowerup.com reviews. They show frame by frame benchmarks, and not just a meaningless FPS. TechPowerup.com is a floor over TomsHardware because of this.
Yet that way to show GPU performance is hard to understand for humans, so that data needs to be sorted, to make it easy understandable, like this figure shows:
Both charts show the same data, but the lower has the data sorted.
Here we see that card B has higher lags, and FPS, and Card A is more consistent even when it haves lower FPS.
It shows on how many frames Card B is worse that Card A, and is more intuitive and readable that the bar charts, who lose a lot of information.
Unfortunately, no web site offers this kind of analysis for GPUs, so there is a way to get an advantage over competition.
So .. in short: Consoles are cheap and easy to use. You pop in the CD, you play your game. You won't be a professional FPS gamer (hence the stick), or it won't amaze you, hence the graphics. But it's easy and simple.
'Hate' is a bit strong word but you do have a point there. It's much more natural to focus my eyes on a certain game objects rather than my hand (i.e. turn the camera with my mouse). And you're right that it's unnecessary because I get the depth of field effect for free with my eyes allready when they're focused on a point on the screen.
Looking at the cartoonish pic above (last page), I would have to agree with you. It looks like they turned up the effect too strongly because they wanted to make it easily visible. The real world doesn't look like that at all. Look at the corner of your room, and you can see a faint darkening in the very corner that gradually brightens as you move away a few inches. But in the above pic, the darkening is strong enough to almost black out the pixels. To be more realistic, I think it needs to be more subtle.
But it is an annoyance since when something isn't focused on the screen, you cannot see it until you turn your camera to it...
Just like when you look something at your side, you don't need to turn your head...
Really? Ray Tracing would make the game 0.3 FPS unless you have a quad Crossfire of HD 7990's, and even then you will only get 4 FPS...
I would have also liked to have seen them include an nvidia card in their benchmarks to see the fps you got doing the same test with the competitors products.