Windows 10: Microsoft Store and DX12 seems bad news for PC-gamers

I've been a long time multi GPU user and support over the years "comes and goes". Currently and for the foreseeable future it's definitely in the "goes" department.

Games that have the best multi GPU support must always have it implemented early in the development cycle. Not many do any more. The majority tack it on later through patches, if at all, and then it's up to some questionable driver support how well it works.

MGPU is not a focus of devs for 'older' API based engines currently being worked on nor is devoting extra resources to learning MGPU implementation in the new API's (DX12/Vulkan etc). Studios are flat out releasing working day one games as it is. Potentially the biggest driving force behind needing MGPU power will come from the as yet unknown success of VR. Either way, single card gaming will be the smoothest way to go this time around.

As for the Microsoft Store - good idea in theory, but the attempted transition period of turning PC's into "Consoles" is going to be filled with a lot of pain for a lot of people.

 

There are many PC gamers (like myself with two 2 G cards) who need multi GPU support to run full HD (1080P). So having one GPU asleep doesn't simply mean we don't have the luxury of 4K, it means our PC visual game experience is poor, worse than console if we have to run DX12 games at medium settings or lower.

Indeed my PC is being turned into a console performance wise, but it's mainly because of zero to date multi GPU support under DX12. I'll be looking at a one card solution when Polaris/Pascal come out. Sadly, that permanent fix may be available before any PC game supports multi GPU's under DX12. Below is today's third patch notes on GOW. That FPS counter works and is welcome, but silence on their previous "we are working on multi GPU support" comment, not even a timeline for it.





Additionally, look at the Nvidia Inspector data (below) for Quantum Break with their latest driver. Interesting to see a separate line now for DX12, but sadly all zeros in the line code. I guess all those game dev/Microsoft celebrations I read about with Quantum Break going gold didn't have any multi GPU gamers invited, as they wouldn't be popping open the champagne if those zeros in the SLI driver code means what I think it means. *chuckle

 

Oh, look at this posted by the GOW game devs





[WIN10] Title Update 3 available for Ultimate Edition on Win10 3/29/2016 | Technical Support and Help | Forums | Gears of War - Official Site

I guess "we will have an update on that in the near future" is some sort of timeline. They spent zero it seems on pre release Marketing as this game's release was surprising to many. If they do become the first to implement Direct X12 multi GPU support, they will get all kinds of free advertising as all the PC game sites will be talking about it and benchmarking the multi GPU data like crazy.

 

I'm thinking about going back to multi-GPU once Pascal comes out and the prices of the 980Ti cards start to drop. Probably some time next year. Hopefully DX12 will have been out long enough by then that it's actually having mGPU implemented consistently.

 

Hopefully for you Maxwell will be supported in Nvidia drivers longer than my Keplers are/were. Look at the benchmarks for 770's on The Division, 27FPS at 1080P, what a shame, lower than a Maxwell 960.

I'll be looking for a single high end Direct X12 card (Pascal or Polaris) that has a reasonable price/performance ratio. We will see if there will be Asynchronous Compute issues with Pascal. Possibly Volta will be the game changer for Nvidia, not Pascal and Volta should be released sometime in 2017, 2018 for "consumers". So Pascal may not have a long life as Nvidia's top cards. If the Pascal Titan X80 is the only Nvidia card with HBM2 memory looks like I won't have that memory if I go with Pascal as I can just imagine what the price will be for a Titan X80. No Thanks.

 

The PC release of Quantum Break, and an early review (below).




Quantum Break for PC Is Yet Another Disappointment from Microsoft

And of course no multi GPU support. And "not encouraging for Microsoft's renewed effort in PC gaming"? It's more than a disappointment. It's getting to be a slap in the face.

Seems even for those with a high end system (GTX 980TI and an I7 5960X) 60 FPS is impossible at 1440P with Ultra settings. In this youtube video (link below), he had to go down to medium settings to get 60. To get 60 FPS with Ultra settings, he had to move down to 1080P. And remember, multi GPU isn't supported so that wouldn't be a fix.

For me, I would have only one Kepler 770 working. Easy math, I'm not buying Quantum Break. Read some of the comments to the performance review. Not surprised.
Quantum Break PC Performance Analysis..... Bad Port ?| GTX 980Ti | i7 5960X 4.5GHz - YouTube

 

For those interested, here are some PC benchmarks on Quantum Break, courtesy of:
gamegpu.com





So for me, my GTX 770 (one card of two) performance would be somewhere around the GTX 960/AMD 7950, but only assuming DX12 would recognize and use the 4G vram in the two cards. So at 1080P that's 30 FPS on average with minimums in the 20's at 1080P. Ya, that's not playable, not a game for me. Note of course the SLI/Crossfire numbers are the same or worse than single card performance.

 

This article by Eurogamers is an interesting read on Quantum Break.





What went wrong with Quantum Break on PC? Eurogamer.net

In addition, check out their side by side video comparison of a GTX 970 versus an AMD R390 playing Quantum Break. As seen so far, AMD seems to be taking the lead on DX12 performance, significantly so in this case.

 

Well I guess this comment from Remedy in the guru3d article ends any hopes for the PC version of Quantum Break ever supporting multiple GPU's.




Quantum Break Will Not Support Multi-GPUs

And the PC game has to be upscaled from 720P (Xbox graphics) which of course leads to "fuzzy Quantum Break for PC". The 720P issue is mentioned in the below article as well from digital trends which I guess inspired the title of the article.





Quantum Break Is Made Worse by a Broken PC Port | Digital Trends

And this comment:




What a mess!

 

Well, I managed to score and uber cheap copy of QB, so I'll let you know how it is in actual day to day gaming.

Considering it took me a ridiculous amount of research just to get my XB1 controller to work (and only if I connect it. Wireless doesn't work at all), it's not really off to a great start.

 

By the "cheap" version do you mean the xbox 1 version? Yes, as some may not know the PC version of Quantum Break is more expensive than the xbox version?????? If you bought the PC version I would assume it would run ok as reports I saw show minimum frames at 58 under full HD with a 980TI. Of course, you would have the 720P scaling issue. Yes, let me know how it is.

On the Gears of War Ultimate Edition front, there have been about 4 PC patches to date. From the latest news from the game devs, muti gpu is still being worked on and if I interpret the below correctly, maybe in May.




[WIN10] Title Update 4 available for Ultimate Edition on Windows 10 - 4/11/2016 | Technical Support and Help | Forums | Gears of War - Official Site

I would recommend to any PC gamer to buy Win 10 GOW Ultimate Edition simply because of the respect and interest the game devs are exhibiting to their PC customers. Take a look at that thread. These guys are fearless, coming on the site time and time again and answering just about all the PC gamer questions in detail. You don't often see this kind of effort and support from any PC port game devs, never mind one that's been released with UWP issues. BRAVE, CARING souls the GOW game devs are. Hats off to them.

 

I managed to snag the PC version for about 66% off. It's definitely not ready for primetime, although I can't tell how much of that is the game and how much of it is the latest Insider build deciding that dwm.exe needs to crash all the time, again.

Think I'm going to clean install build 11099 tomorrow, as I know that build is stable for gaming, and then I'll play some more QB and report back.

Early impressions: Great story so far, terrible optimization.

 

Great. If you can get a third party FPS counter overlay to work, please let me know what your actual min frames are in single player.

As you likely know, this is the thread with the game dev's comments on the current issues. Too long a list to post so I'll just post the link. I noticed they are recommending driver 362 for Nvidia owners. I assume they haven't tested the latest drivers. FYI, 364.96 Hot Fix is working fine for me in GOW, Witcher 3 and Project Cars.

If you could post a youtube video of single player with an FPS counter that would be awesome. Doesn't matter if you're not as good as Archie was at game play on his Rise of the Tomb Raider video, not to assume you wouldn't be, but I'd only be focusing on the FPS drops.*Wink
http://community.remedygames.com/for...-status-update

 

I'll see what I can do once I get it working again. After rolling back to 14279, now it just black screens at launch. I've read that there is a third party FPS counter that works, though, so if I can get the game working again, I'll try it out.

 

Thanks Blackrose. I believe the FPS counter that works with UWP is Presentmon. I saw this posted by a guru3d member.




Quantum Break Performance and Impressions - Guru3D.com Forums

Seems you can also produce and save a graph of your frame times. I haven't tried Presentmon because with GOW all we had to do was ask and the game dev provided an in game FPS counter in one of their patches.