One of the headline features for AMD’s GCN architecture is their superb support for Asynchronous Compute. One of the showcases games for Asynchronous Compute and DX12, Ashes of the Singularity has used the feature to provide AMD with a significant boost in that title. However, it looks like Asynchronous Compute will be harder to manage if Hitman is anything to go by.
According to IO Interactive, Hitman only gained about 5-10% performance boost on AMD cards after implementing Asynchronous Compute. This is a bit lower than expected given all the hype around the feature. Furthermore, IO Interactive had to do a lot of tuning and it was ‘super-hard’ to implement properly in order to no suffer any performance loss. This is still much better than the issue faced by Nvidia cards which virtually gained nothing from Asynchronous Compute.
For an early implementation of Asynchronous Compute in what is still mainly a DX11 title, 5-10% isn’t that bad. If AMD is able to get Asynchronous Compute into game engines and integrate it into game development on the ground up, easier and more plentiful gains will likely follow. For now, Asynchronous Compute is still enough to put AMD cards ahead of their various competitors and 10% isn’t something to scoff at, especially combined with other DX12 gains.
