Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-ha...ing-tested

Nvidia just released its latest 451.48 drivers for Windows PCs. These are the first fully-certified DirectX 12 Ultimate drivers, but they also add support for WDDM 2.7—that's Windows Display Driver Model 2.7. New to Windows 10 with the May 2020 update, and now supported with Nvidia's drivers, is hardware scheduling. This new feature shows up in the Windows display settings, at the bottom under the Graphics Settings, provided you have a Pascal or later generation Nvidia GPU. Could this help the best graphics cards perform even better and maybe shake up the GPU hierarchy? Probably not, but we decided to find out with empirical testing.

First, it's important to note that this is not a new hardware feature but rather a new API feature. GPUs, at least as far as we understand things, have been able to support GPU hardware scheduling for some time. The description from Microsoft is vague as well.
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What to make of all of this, then? Nvidia now supports a feature that can potentially improve its performance in some games. Except, it seems just as likely to hurt performance as well. This is a new API and driver feature, however, so perhaps it will prove more beneficial over time. Or perhaps I should have dug out a slower CPU or disabled some cores and threads. I'll leave that testing for someone else for now.

At present, across five tested games using multiple APIs, on average (looking at all nine or ten tests), the change in performance is basically nothing. The 9900K with RTX 2080 Ti performance is 0.03% slower, and the GTX 1050 with the 9900K performed 0.73% slower. The 3900X with RTX 2080 Ti did benefit, but only to the tune of 0.06%. In other words, the one or two cases where performance did improve are cancelled out by performance losses in other games.

If you're serious about squeezing out every last bit of performance possible, maybe for a benchmark record, you can try enabling or disabling the feature to see which performs best for the specific test(s) you're running. For most people, however, it appears to be a wash. Your time will be better spent playing games than trying to figure out when you should enable or disable hardware scheduling—and rebooting your PC between changes.