Ashes of the Singularity Revisited: A Beta Look at DirectX 12 & Asynchronous Shading
by Daniel Williams & Ryan Smith on February 24, 2016 1:00 PM ESTClosing Thoughts
Wrapping up our second look at Ashes of the Singularity and third overall look at Oxide’s Nitrous engines, it’s interesting to see where things have changed and where they have stayed the same.
Thanks to the general performance optimizations made since our initial look at Ashes, the situation for multi-GPU via DirectX 12 explicit multi-adapter is both very different and very similar. On an absolute basis it’s now a lot harder to max out a multi-GPU configuration; with reasonable quality settings we’re CPU limited even up to 4K, requiring we further increase the rendering quality. This more than anything else handily illustrates just how much performance has improved since the last beta. On the other hand it’s still the most unusual pairing – a Radeon R9 Fury X with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti – that delivers the best multi-GPU performance, which just goes to show what RTG and NVIDIA can accomplish working together.
As for the single GPU configurations, I’m not sure things as they currently stand could be any more different. NVIDIA cards have very good baseline DX11 performance in Ashes of the Singularity, but they mostly gain nothing from Ashes’ DX12 rendering path. RTG cards on the other hand have poorer DX11 performance, but they gain a significant amount of performance from the DX12 rendering path. In fact they gain so much performance that against traditional competitive lineups (e.g. Fury X vs. 980 Ti), the RTG cards are well in the lead, which isn’t usually the case elsewhere.
Going hand-in-hand with DX12, RTG’s cards are the only products to consistently benefit from Ashes’ improved asynchronous shading implementation. Whereas our NVIDIA cards see a very slight regression (with NVIDIA telling us that async shading is not currently enabled in their drivers), the Radeons improve in performance, especially the top-tier Fury X. This by itself isn’t wholly surprising given some of our theories about Fury X’s strengths and weaknesses, but for Ashes of the Singularity performance it further compounds on the other DX12 performance gains for RTG.
Ultimately Ashes gives us a very interesting look at the state of DirectX 12 performance for both RTG and NVIDIA cards, though no more and no less. As we stated at the start of this article this is beta software and performance is subject to change – not to mention the overall sample size of one game – but it is a start. For RTG this certainly lends support to their promotion of and expectations for DirectX 12, and it should be interesting to see how things shape up in March and beyond once the gold version of Ashes is released, and past that even more DirectX 12 games.
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CiccioB - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
The so called ASync Compute implementation AMD has in HW IS NOT PART OF DX12 SPECIFICS.I hope that is clear written that way.
DX12 describe the use of multiple threads flying at the same time. nvidia does support them, with some limitations in number and preemption capabilities with respect to what AMD HW can.
This however does not mean that nvdia HW does not support Async compute or it is out of specs. AMD just made a better implementation of it.
Think it as it was for tessellation: nvidia implementation is way better than AMD one, but the fact that AMD can't go over certain values does not mean they are not DX11 compliant.
What you are looking here is a benchmark (more than a game) that stresses the multi-threaded capabilities of AMD HW. You can see that AMD is in a better position here. But the question is: how many other games are going to benefit from using such a technique and how many of them are going to implement such a heavy duty load?
We just don't know now. We have to wait to see if this technique can really improve performance (and thus image quality) in many other situations or it is just a show off for AMD (that has clearly partnered to make this feature even more heavy on nvidia HW).
When nvidia will star making developers using their HW accelerated Voxels we will start to see what feature is going to hit worse one another's HW and which is going to give better image quality improvements.
For now I just think this is a over used feature that like many other engine characteristics in DX11 is going to give advantage to one side rather than the other.
anubis44 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
That's because it never will be. You can't enable missing hardware.xTRICKYxx - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
I hate to be that guy, but I think it is time to dump the X79 platform for X99 or Z170.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Yep, Broadwell-E is on our list of things to do once it's out.Will Robinson - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
NVidia got rekt.DX12 lays the smak on Chizow's green dreams.
Roboyt0 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Do you have 3840x2160 results for the R9 290X per chance?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
No. We only ran 4K on Fury X and 980 Ti.Stuka87 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Really hating the colors of the graphs here. All grey, legend has one blue item, but no blue on the graph....Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
It's something of a limitation of the CMS. The color bar is the average; the grey bars are in the same order as they are in the legend: normal, medium, and heavy batch counts.Mr Perfect - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I was wondering what was up with that. Maybe someone could do a little MS-Paint bucket fill on the images before publishing? :)