One of the most exciting parts of Microsoft's DirectX 12 API is the ability to pair graphics cards of varying generations, performance, or even manufacturers together in a single PC, to pool their resources and thus make games and applications run better. Unfortunately, testing "Explicit Multi Adaptor" (EMA) support under real-world conditions (i.e. not synthetic benchmarks) has so far proven difficult. There's only been one game designed to take advantage of DX12's numerous low-level improvements—including asynchronous compute, which allows GPUs to execute multiple command queues simultaneously—and the early builds of that game didn't feature support for multiple GPUs.
As you might have guessed from the headline of this story, it does now. The latest beta version of Stardock's real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity includes full support for EMA, meaning that for the first time we can just what kind of a performance boost we can get by doing the previously unthinkable and sticking an AMD and Nvidia card into the same PC. That's not to mention seeing how EMA stacks up again SLI or Crossfire—which have to be turned off in order to use DX12's multi-GPU features—and whether AMD can repeat the ridiculous performance gains seen in the older Ashes benchmark.
Benchmarks conducted by a variety of sites, including Anandtech, Techspot, PC World, and Maximum PC all point to the same thing: EMA works, scaling can reach as high as 70 percent when adding a second GPU, and yes, AMD and Nvidia cards play nicely together.
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