The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAshes of the Singularity Escalation
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run a fixed v2.11 version of the game due to some peculiarities of the splash screen added after the merger with the standalone Escalation expansion, and have an automated tool to call the benchmark on the command line. (Prior to v2.11, the benchmark also supported 8K/16K testing, however v2.11 has odd behavior which nukes this.)
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at Extreme settings, and take the frame-time output for our average, percentile, and time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
AMD gets in the mix a lot with these tests, and in a number of cases pulls ahead of the Ryzen chips in the Time Under analysis.
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Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
We didn't post gaming performance for Ryzen at launch either, for similar reasons.bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Stop lying , you commented on gaming performance in your conclusion, without even benchmarking it in gaming.That is much worse.
Adul - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
How is that lying? They did not post gaming benchmarks. That is what he said.What was mention in conclusion was not part of his statement.Integr8d - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
It's called lying by omission...James S - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Ian did not lie even by omission. They clearly stated in the Ryzen conclusion and clearly stated in the Skylake-x conclusion why they didn't test gaming.“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time”
just4U - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
I think it's pretty ignorant of someone to state that Ian is lying in his own comments about articles he has written....alysdexia - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Omission isn't lyging; it's self-censorship.Gothmoth - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
intel pays good money for advertising at anandtech....Nfarce - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Listen to you fanyboy crybabies. Tom's and Guru3D did gaming benches too. Go find a Reddit AMD fanboy forum that will give a 100% glowing review of your precious Threadsnapper. You won't find a single credible tech site out there doing it. It's called impartiality. Oh and one more thing ladies: you all are aware that AMD sent the major tech review sites the EXACT same hardware kit for review, right?tuxRoller - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
ThreadSNAPPER? If this was intentional, I assume it's meant to be derogatory, but I'm not sure what it is meant to imply.