Fable Legends Early Preview: DirectX 12 Benchmark Analysis
by Ryan Smith, Ian Cutress & Daniel Williams on September 24, 2015 9:00 AM ESTDiscussing Percentiles and Minimum Frame Rates
Continuing from the previous page, we performed a similar analysis on AMD's Fury X graphics card. Same rules apply - all three resolution/setting combinations using all three system configurations. Results are given as frame rate profiles showing percentiles as well as choosing the 90th, 95th and 99th percentile values to get an indication of minimum frame rates.
Moving on to the Fury X at 4K and we see all three processor lineups performing similarly, giving us an indication that we are more GPU limited here. There is a slight underline on the Core i7 though, giving slightly lower frame rates in easier scenes but a better frame rate when the going gets tough beyond the 95th percentile.
For 1080p, the results take a twist. It almost seems as if we have some form of reverse scaling, whereby more cores is doing more damage to the results. If we have a look at the breakdown provided by the in-game benchmark (given in milliseconds, so lower is better):
Three areas stand out as benefitting from fewer cores: Transparency and Effects, GBuffer Rendering and Dynamic Lighting. All three are related to illumination and how the illumination interacts with its surroundings. One reason springs to mind on this – with large core counts, too many threads are issuing work to the graphics card causing thread contention in the cache or giving the thread scheduler a hard time depending on what comes in as high priority.
Nevertheless, the situation changes when we move down again to 720p:
Here the Core i3 takes a nose dive as we become CPU limited to pushing out the frames.
141 Comments
View All Comments
Traciatim - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
RAM generally has very little to no impact on gaming except for a few strange cases (like F1).Though, the machine still has it's cache available so the i3 test isn't quite the same thing as a real i3 it should be close enough that you wouldn't notice the difference.
Mr Perfect - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
In the future, could you please include/simulate a 4 core/8 thread CPU? That's probably what most of us have.Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
How about Ashes running on a Fury and a 4.5 GHz FX CPU.Oxford Guy - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
and a 290X, of course, paired against a 980vision33r - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
Just because a game supports DX12 doesn't mean it uses all DX12 features. It looks like they have DX12 as a check box but not really utilizing DX12 complete features. We have to see more DX12 implemenations to know for sure how each card stack up.Wolfpup - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
I'd be curious about a direct X 12 vs 11 test at some point.Regarding Fable Legends, WOW am I disappointed by what it is. I shouldn't be in a sense, I mean I'm not complaining that Mario Baseball isn't a Mario game, but still, a "free" to play deathmatch type game isn't what I want and isn't what I think of with Fable (Even if, again, really this could be good for people who want it, and not a bad use of the license).
Just please don't make a sequel to New Vegas or Mass Effect or Bioshock that's deathmatch LOL
toyotabedzrock - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
You should have used the new driver given you where told it was related to this specific game preview.Shellshocked - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
Does this benchmark use Async compute?Spencer Andersen - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
Negative, Unreal Engine does NOT use Async compute except on Xbox One. Considering that is one of the main features of the newer APIs, what does that tell you? Nvidia+Unreal Engine=BFF But I don't see it as a big deal considering that Frostbite and likely other engines already have most if not all DX12 features built in including Async compute.Great article guys, looking forward to more DX12 benchmarks. It's an interesting time in gaming to say the least!
oyabun - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link
There is something wrong with the webpages of the article, an ad by Samsung seems to cover the entire page and messes up all the rendering. Furthermore wherever I click a new tab opens at www.space.com! I had to reload several times just to be able to post this!