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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extide - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
If you are CPU limited, and it's using lots of threads, then yeah more cores would be faster. They were CPU limited on an overclocked 4960X, which is no slouch, that was very surprising!rhysiam - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
I agree that will be very interesting. I'm surprised more hasn't been made of the seemingly pretty hard CPU limit to ~70fps, irrespective of the detail settings or resolution. And that on a still very capable 4960X @ 4.2Ghz. If we estimate Skylake has a 20% IPC advantage, that would still see the current top tier 6700K (at stock) maxing out in the mid 80s, a long way short of what you might like on a 144hz monitor. Does that mean a brand new quad core CPU like the i5 6400 with its low base clock might struggle to sustain 60fps, even on lower detail settings?I realise this is beta and all preliminary, but it's interesting nonetheless.
DanNeely - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Does DX12 Multi-adapter offer any benefits with cards that are mismatched in performance? I'm currently running a GTX 980 in my main PC and also have an older GTX 770 sitting around; would pairing them offer any speedup over just the 980, or would the faster card end up held back by the slower one?I'd be equally interested in seeing how AMD does with significantly mismatched GPUs; since they've been trying (with varying degrees of success) to push XFire between their IGPs and the significantly faster chips in midrange Radeon cards.
BigLan - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
The article has a quote from the developer about using mismatched cards..."For example, you will never get more than twice the speed of the slowest video card. You would be better off just using the new card alone."
You might get some benefit, but likely not that much.
Friendly0Fire - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
I think that's rather narrow minded and way too absolute. Mismatched cards can be used to their full potential, but you'd need some smart coding to make it so. For instance, you could offload some of the work to the weaker GPU, keeping the stronger one for the main rendering.One excellent example which would fully utilize two mismatched cards is VR: multiadapter rendering would be used to offload the VR projection and transformation steps to the integrated GPU in most modern CPUs, while the main GPU would do the regular rendering. The data transfer requirement is minimal, but there's a fair amount of computations required, making it an ideal scenario.
Other examples include doing post-processing on the weaker card (SSAO, subsurface scattering, screenspace reflections, etc.). The big problem is judging just how much work should be offloaded to the secondary GPU - just detecting the hardware would be extremely laborious.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
It's a correct description for how Ashes works. They implement a (relatively) straightforward AFR setup, so the cards need to be similar in performance.Senti - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
What Multi-adapter does is left completely to developer. In some cases it can give you nothing, in others every bit of hardware can be useful including iGPU.extide - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Their current implementation is AFR, so the performance of the cards should be as close to identical as possible. In the future I think they may plan on offloading some of the raw compute onto a second GPU, and in that case an older slower GPU would be beneficial.Drumsticks - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
These are always interesting results to see. I'm pretty excited for Polaris - I can't wait to pickup a higher end GPU to replace my old, old 7850.mattevansc3 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Isn't Oxide's statement that they don't optimise for certain hardware a bit disingenuous?If you read their developer diaries not only was AoS built around Mantle, not only was the engine built upon Mantle but they've stated that they developed more of Mantle than AMD did.
Before DX12 was even announced Oxide were working directly with AMD and building AoS to champion Mantle and take advantage of it a low level while only supporting nVidia hardware on DX11. That of course will automatically bias results in favour of RTG even if there is no intention to do so at this stage.