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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Koenig168 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
There is a brief mention of GTX 680 2GB "CPU memory limitations". I take it you mean "VRAM memory limitations". It would be interesting to know if this can be overcome by DX12 memory stacking, either a pair of GTX 680s or the GTX 690.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
That was meant to be "GPU memory limitations", thanks for the catch.B3an - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Why is Beta 2 still not available on Steam? Have the media got early access? At the time of posting this there's still only Beta 1 available.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
It's out to the public tomorrow.hemipepsis5p - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Hey, so I'm confused by the mixed GPU testing. I thought that both cards had to be the same in order to run them in SLI/Crossfire? How did they test a Fury X + 980Ti?Ext3h - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
That's no longer the case with DX12. It used to be like this with DX11 and earlier versions, when the driver decided if/how to split the workload onto multiple GPUs, but with DX12 that choice is now up to the application.So if the developer chooses to support asymmetric configurations, even cross vendor or exotic combinations like Intel IGP + AMD dGPU, then it can be made to work.
anubis44 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I'm willing to bet that nVidia's Maxwell cards can't use DX12's async compute at all, and they're falling back to the DX11 code path, even when you 'enable' DX12 for them.Ext3h - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
You loose that bet.The asynchronous compute term only defines how tasks are synchronized against each other, whereby the "asynchronous" term only states tasks won't block while waiting for each other. The default of doing that in software, in order to create a sequential schedule, is perfectly legit and fulfills the specification in whole.
Hardware support isn't required for this feature at all, even though you *can* optionally use hardware to perform much better than the software solution. Parallel execution does require hardware support and can bring an huge performance boost, but "asynchronous compute" does not specify that parallel execution would be required.
BradGrenz - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
The whole point of async compute is to take advantage of parallel execution. It doesn't matter what nVidia's drivers tell an application, if it accepts these commands but is forced to reorder them for serial execution because the hardware can do nothing else then it doesn't really support the technology at all. It's be like claiming support for texture compression even though your driver has to decompress every texture to an uncompressed format before the GPU can read it. It doesn't matter if the application thinks compressed textures are being used if the hardware actually provides none of the benefits the technology intended (in this case more/larger textures in a given amount of VRAM, and in the case of async compute, more efficient utilization of shader ALUs).Sajin - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
"Update 02/24: NVIDIA sent a note over this afternoon letting us know that asynchornous shading is not enabled in their current drivers, hence the performance we are seeing here. Unfortunately they are not providing an ETA for when this feature will be enabled."Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10067/ashes-of-the-s...