Ashes of the Singularity

Sorely missing from our benchmark suite for quite some time have been RTSes, which don’t enjoy quite the popularity they once did. As a result Ashes holds a special place in our hearts, and that’s before we talk about the technical aspects. Based on developer Oxide Games’ Nitrous Engine, Ashes has been designed from the ground up for low-level APIs like DirectX 12. As a result of all of the games in our benchmark suite, this is the game making the best use of DirectX 12’s various features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threadeded work submission and high batch counts. What we see can’t be extrapolated to all DirectX 12 games, but it gives us a very interesting look at what we might expect in the future.

Ashes of the Singularity - 3840x2160 - Extreme Quality (DX12)

Ashes of the Singularity - 2560x1440 - Extreme Quality (DX12)

Of all of the games in our benchmark suite, Ashes is perhaps the most unusual. Besides being built for low-level APIs like DirectX 12 from the start, its rendering optimizations scale very well with resolution. As a result it takes a lot of rendering power to play Ashes with all the bells & whistles turned on, but once you can reach that point, going to 4K isn’t too much harder.

In any case, the GTX 1080 Ti becomes the first card to crack 60fps at 4K in this game. In doing so it’s 27% faster than the GTX 1080, and 71% faster than the GTX 980 Ti. Performance has actually reached a point that if we drop to 1440p, we start being CPU-limited a not-insignificant percentage of the time. So the GTX 1080 Ti outright needs 4K to really put its best foot forward.

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  • eddman - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link

    Adjusted for inflation: http://i.imgur.com/ZZnTS5V.png
  • Meteor2 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link

    Great charts!
  • mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link

    Except they excude the Titans, Fury, etc.
  • eddman - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link

    I, personally, made these charts.

    No titans because they are very niche cards for those gamers who cannot wait and/or have more money than sense. The following Ti variants perform almost as good as the titan cards anyway.

    No radeons because this is an nvidia-only chart. I should've titled it as such. I focused on nvidia because ATI/AMD usually don't price their cards so high.
  • mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link

    Ok on the Radeon angled, shoulda realised it was NV only. :D

    However, your description of those who buy Titans cannot be anything than your own opinion, and what you don't realise is that for many store owners it's these very top-tier cards which bring in the majority of their important profit margins. They make far less on the mainstream cards. They enthusiast market is extremely important, whether or not one individually regards the products as being relevant for one's own needs. You need to be objective here.
  • mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link

    Sorry for the typos... am on a train, wobbly kybd. :D Is this site ever gonna get modern and allow editing??...
  • eddman - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link

    I think I am being objective. Titan cards do not fit into the regular geforce range. They are like an early pass. Wait a few months and you can have a Ti that performs the same at a much lower price.

    If nvidia never released a similar performing Ti card, I would've included them.
  • eddman - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link

    Also I don't see how stores and their profits has anything to do with that.
  • Mr Perfect - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link

    Nice work on those charts.

    So there where a couple years where top tier cards where $400 or less. Inflation number normalize that price a fair bit though.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link

    Those days are long-gone, and not just because of profit taking. 16/14nm FinFET GPUs are astonishingly expensive to design and fab. The masks are in the millions, and now everything has to be double-patterned.

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