Hey guys thought I'd ask this q here since I am unable to find a proper answer anywhere else. I am looking at getting a Gigabyte Gtx 970 G1 Gaming card, but I want to know first if it will full support DX12 when win 10 is released. I'm asking this here because no one seems to know. You have 2 places saying yes it will be fully supported, and a bunch of other places where people are arguing that it supports it only partially or doesn't support it at all. If anyone here is able to clear this up for me I would greatly appreciate it. (And no don't tell me to get a 980 or 980ti instead as they are well out of my budget). (Currently have an AMD card but it's given me various issues like not allowing me to play spring RTS)
Short answer: yes. Long answer: 970 supports feature level 12_1, that's the highest you can get right now and that's enough to say it has "advanced" directx 12 support. Even though some AMD gpus support certain features better then gtx 970, they don't support all features needed to get to 12_1. There is no gpu that supports all directx 12 features to the highest tier.
Is there a DX3D 12 feature specification publicly available anywhere? I did a quick search but the only thing I came across was a GDC talk about DirectX 12.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_levels_in_Direct3D#Direct3D_12 The best I can find, doesn't have much sources though. The will be official specification on microsoft sooner or later.
Thank you for the clarification ZX0. Just need to make sure that the gtx 970 will last me a while. EDIT: I really considered AMD's cards, but the issues I've had with for example Spring RTS has pushed me towards Nvidia again.
There's a good article on Wikipedia that breaks it down. @nicb1 why can't you play spring on an amd card?! You play on linux or something? I play spring on an r9 280 (hd 7950 essentially) with no issue. Back on topic, dx12 feature levels aren't the whole story. Amd has far better resource allocation than anything from nvidia, and then there are loads of optional things. @zxo is correct that there are currently 0 cards on the market that support everything. AMD has better hardware level support for scheduling (which is why the r9 285 spanks the titan x for draw calls performance, which is potentially a biggie for future rts titles). Nvidia has baked in some newer rendering techniques so has fl 12_1 support on Maxwell (970 included) where amd has fl 12_0 on its newest cards. With all that said, I wouldn't get overly hung up on 'full support' anyway... As confusing as it sounds, a card with dx12 fl 11_0 support *does support dx 12* (dx 12 feature levels are nothing to do with earlier versions of direct x so fl11 doesn't mean dx11 and fl 12_1 isn't dx12.1, they just reffer to different parts of the dx12 spec with fl 11 being the minimum supported feature set). What this means as far as I understand it is: anyone with a gtx 400 series, or hd7000 series or newer card *will be able to run dx12 games. Cards with higher feature or scheduling capabilities stand to perform better, and it may enable some extra bells and whistles, but new games will work. Final thought, I'd wait until the fury x drops and is benchmarked next week before purchasing. I know its out of your price range, but it looks set to take the performance crown, which should prompt nvidia to adjust pricing.
Spring RTS worked for me on the old engine versions like 94.0, but any version up from that just straight up throws me errors (The only solution I've been given is to downgrade my drivers to a really old version). I have an AMD R9 270x atm. EDIT: Also If you guys think the performance gains from upgrading from a 270x to something like a gtx 970 aren't worth it let me know.
I played spring last week on the omega drivers no issue, whoever told you that is feeding you bs (which will no doubt result in more 'amd drivers suck' comments being thrown around). A 270x is based on same gen tech as my card so it will definitely work, just need to check settings. At what point do you get the error?
When I launch the game it happens after the load screen is almost finished. I'll see if I can find the thread where I reported the issue and will test it again when I get back home. (Will be back in about 1 hour from now). EDIT: Here is the old bug report thread from me. (I'll give spring a try again when I get back home). If you can help me with this I may end up deciding to get an AMD card again. (The spring devs tend to complain a lot about AMD's crap OpenGl support in other similar threads on the actual spring forums).
Amd's open gl support isnt that bad, spring devs all use nvidia cards and then complain when things don't work on and cause they haven't tested it. As noted during development of pa, amd sick rigidly to the ogl spec whilst nvidia have added in random undocumented work arounds in. The issue is developing on nvidia is likely to result in a dev relying on an unofficial workaround which will prevent the game working on other hardware.
@nicb1 Ok I did some tests.... think I know what the issue might be. I normally play on reduced settings (throwback from older machine). On these settings spring is running fab. When I turn all the bells and whistles up to max (which I should be able to with a 280) then when I load into game all I get is a black screen (this is playing latest BA). Settings that are working for me: - Fullscreen at screen native resolution (1920 x 1080). - Vysnc on (but doesn't appear to work as I'm getting 100fps on a 60 hz screen :S) - 24 bit colour depth - 3D trees: on - Shadows: on - Reflective units: on - Use Pixelbuffer objects: off (this could be causing problems and I don't think you need it) - High resolution Clouds: on - Water: basic - AA all turned off - Dynamic Clouds: off - compress textures: off (shouldn't need this with a 270x anyway, as it's to conserve vram) - Enable LuaShaders support: off (I think this might be the culprit) Essentially one of those disabled settings is probably what makes it crash. I don't have time to go through each of them to find out which one right now (got to go to work myself). What I'd reccomend, turn everything off / onto minimum, and join a game as a spectator or something and prove that works (if that doesn't it's maybe worth looking at settings in Catalyst as it could be forcing a setting in driver, although I haven't had to do any tinkering like that). If that works, try the settings I'm using and they experiment from there. I think LUA might be the cause though (that is probably what changed between 94 and 98). I mean the amount of issues LUA support has caused (like the death of the vastly superior MT version)... LUA to spring is like Coherent to PA. Great for modding, but an absolute pain in the backside for other reasons.
One can rightly say that Nvidia is the Internet Explorer of Graphic Cards (Back in the last decade, Microsoft made IE 5 - 7 to understand tag soups, that didn't adhere to any specification of what was reasonable HTML. The result was that some web developers (working only with IE as reference) relied on those wonky behaviours for displaying their web sites correctly. The remains of this disaster, which almost torn the internet apart, can still be seen as expression of fear and grievance in the faces of front-end developers, just by mentioning the unholy words: "quirk mode". By the way: Even the new browser Microsoft made for Windows 10, supports some "compatibility" quirk mode.)
Don't talk to me about bloody IE... or the sodding UK NHS for that matter :/ I'm not (usually) a web developer, but I do know xhtml and css coding pretty well so I 'inherited' the web development duties for an old site of one of my customers. Then Google moves the goal posts on the mobile thing, so I completely replaced the css framework to make it scale to different screen sizes, which works a treat on Windows Phone, BB10, Ios, Andoird, Chrome, Firefox and IE 9+. Then the phone calls started from the NHS who couldn't view the site because.... they're still using Windows XP and IE 7. Then I had to write a second CSS framework without scaling to cope with browsers pre IE 9. At least IE lets you simulate the older browsers to see how it screws up.
I only ran one unsuccessful test with spring NOTA 94.1 yesterday. Got lazy after that. Will download the latest version of zero-k as well to test the new spring release later today and I will also play around with the settings then. As to what tag, I'm not exactly sure as to what you are referring to there. Anyway offtopic, some of the stores that I buy my pc parts from have revealed the aussie pricing of the amd r9 390 and 390x. The specs are listed as well, although i'm not sure if they are accurate. R9 390: http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Graphics_Cards/AMD/59708-GV-R939G1_GAMING-8GD R9 390X: (Safe to say this is out of my budget) http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Graphics_Cards/AMD/59707-GV-R939XG1_GAMING-8GD EDIT: When it comes to overclocking we don't know much about the 300 series atm, but with the 970 I've heard that people have pushed it to gtx 980 levels without any issues. I have to remember the fact that the 300 series has a heck of a lot more vram than the gtx 970. EDIT2: Just tried a build of Zero-K running on spring 98. It appears that the issue I was having pops up in version 96 but not 98 so thats good news. On the annoying side of things I have to wait for NOTA to update to the latest engine . But atleast its sorted now. EDIT3: Well information on the 300 series is out. It is barely different from the 200 series but more expensive. I think Linus (linustechtips youtube) summarised it as you mayaswell get a 290 and replace the 2 with a 3 using a marker. In certain benchmarks there has been shown to be at max a 5fps difference between the 200 and 300 series. EDIT: Apparently somone tore down the 390x and it is a complete rebrand with the only performance boost coming from drivers. Well this leaves a bad taste. (The same performance gains can be achieved on a 290x with minor driver tweaks). I can buy a 290X for $410 whereas a 390X would cost me $650. What were AMD smoking.
The '300' cards aren't new (i think the card manufacturers simply wanted new branding). The only new chip is Fiji which powers the new fury range and that looks impressive. They have announced 4 fury cards in total: fury x (water cooled, same price as 980ti yet looks faster than titan x), fury (air cooled, quite a bit cheaper). Fury nano (cut gpu, lower clocks, air cooled but only needs power of you 270x and should still out run a 290x or 980) and there's a ridiculous dual fury card due as well later in the year. They should have left the rest of the range as is imo. Anyways, all I'd recommend is hold fire on your purchase until after the fury releases as for the first time in ages there will be serious pressure on nvidias best, which has got to improve prices. I agree though, the 290 at its current price is a very good deal, the extra vram on the 390 is only useful if you intend to go triple monitor or 4k or something.
