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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
153 Comments
View All Comments
tuxRoller - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
It's the simpler drivers which provide less room to hide architectural deficiencies.My point was that, across the board, gcn improves its performance a good deal relative to d3d11. That includes cards that are four years old. I don't think Maxwell is older than that.
I don't think we are really disagreeing, though.
RMSe17 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Nowhere near as bad as the DX9 fiasco back in the FX 5xxx days where a low level ATi card would demolish the highest end GeForcept2501 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Few if anyone here is going to remember the fiasco when the radeon 9700 pro demolished the competition in performance and stability. Even fewer remember nvidia "optimizing" games with lower quality textures to compete.dray67 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I remember it and it was the reason I went for the 9700 and the later 9800, atm I'm back to Nvidia I've had 2 AMD card die on me due to heat, as much as I like them I've had my fingers burnt and moved away from them, if dx12 and dual gpu support becomes better supported I'll buy a high AMD card in an instant.knightspawn1138 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I remember it clearly. My Radeon 9800 was the last ATI card I bought. I loved it for years, and only ended up replacing it with an NVidia card when the Catalyst Control Center started sucking all the cycles out of my CPU. It's funny that half of the comments on this article complain that NVidia's drivers are over-optimized for every specific game, yet ATI and AMD were content to allow the CCC to be a resource hog that ruined even non-gaming performance for years. I'm happy with my NVidia cards. I've been able to easily play all modern games with great performance using a pair of GTX 460's, and recently replaced those with a GTX 970.xenol - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Considering there aren't any other async shader games in development and nothing announced and with Pascal coming within the next year (which maybe, a game might actually use DX12) which will probably alleviate the situation, your evaluation of NVIDIA's situation is pretty poor.It takes more than a generation or a game to make a hardware company go down. NVIDIA suffered plenty during its GeForce FX days, and it got right back on its feet.
MattKa - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
No, no, no. An RTS game that probably isn't going to sell very well and seems incredibly lacking is going to destroy Nvidia.gamerk2 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
AMD has had an async compute engine in their GPUs going back to the 7000 series. NVIDIA has not. Stands to reason AMD would do better in async compute based benchmarking.Let's see how Pascal compares, since it's being designed with DX12, and async compute, in mind.
agentbb007 - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
"NVIDIA telling us that async shading is not currently enabled in their drivers", yeah this pretty much sums it up. This beta stuff is interesting but just that beta...JlHADJOE - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
The GTX 680 seems to have done well though. I feel like Maxwell is being let down by the compromises Nvidia made optimizing for FP16 only and sacrificing real compute performance.