[Manuel Calavera]

Async Compute, which has been used for SSAA (Screen Space Anti Aliasing), SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and the calculation of light tiles in HITMAN, was also “super hard” to tune; according to IO Interactive, too much Async work can even make it a penalty, and then there’s also the fact that PC has lots of different configurations that need tuning.
Even in Ashes of the Singularity, which has been the center of the whole DirectX 12 & Async Compute talk for quite a few months, developers have confirmed that Async Compute is a modest performance increase compared to others in their game.
Saying that Multi-Engine (aka Async Compute) is the root of performance increases on Ashes between DX11 to DX12 on AMD is definitely not true. Most of the performance gains in AMDs case are due to CPU driver head reductions. Async is a modest perf increase relative to that. Weirdly, though there is a marketing deal on Ashes with AMD, they never did ask us to use async compute. Since it was part of D3D12, we just decided to give it a whirl.
That definitely shows how, despite an increasing number of developers looking at some kind of Compute implementation for their games, Asynchronous Compute isn’t a magic wand that grants huge performance benefits. There are many other factors to be considered when looking at performance in games and some are definitely more important than Async Compute; moreover, for some types of games it may not necessarily bring noticeable improvements due to the way they’re structured, just like not every game is CPU overhead bound under DirectX 11.