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 ESTDirectX 12 Single-GPU Performance
We’ll start things off with a look at single-GPU performance. For this, we’ve grabbed a collection of RTG and NVIDIA GPUs covering the entire DX12 generation, from GCN 1.0 and Kepler to GCN 1.2 and Maxwell. This will give us a good idea of how the game performs both across a wide span of GPU performance levels, and how (if at all) the various GPU generational changes play a role.
Meanwhile unless otherwise noted, we’re using Ashes’ High quality setting, which turns up a number of graphical features and also utilizes 2x MSAA. It’s also worth mentioning that while Ashes does allow async shading to be turned off and on, this option is on by default unless turned off in the game’s INI file.
Starting at 4K, we have the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X. On the latest beta the Fury X has a strong lead over the normally faster GTX 980 Ti, beating it by 20% and coming close to hitting 60fps.
When we drop down to 1440p and introduce last-generation’s flagship video cards, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X, the story is much the same. The Fury X continues to hold a 10fps lead over the GTX 980 Ti, giving it an 18% lead. Similarly, the R9 290X has an 8fps lead over the 780 Ti, translating into a 19% performance lead. This is a significant turnabout from where we normally see these cards, as 780 Ti traditionally holds a lead over the 290X.
Meanwhile looking at the average framerates with different batch count intensities, there admittedly isn’t much remarkable here. All cards take roughly the same performance hit with increasingly larger batch counts.
Finally at 1080p, with our full lineup of cards we can see that RTG’s lead in this latest beta is nearly absolute. The 2012 flagship battle between the 7970 and the GTX 680 puts the 7970 in the lead by 12%, or just shy of 4fps. Elsewhere the GTX 980 Ti does close on the Fury X, but RTG’s current-gen flagship remains in the lead.
The one outlier here is the Radeon R9 285, which is the only 2GB RTG card in our collection. At this point we suspect it’s VRAM limited, but it would require further investigation.
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CiccioB - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
The so called ASync Compute implementation AMD has in HW IS NOT PART OF DX12 SPECIFICS.I hope that is clear written that way.
DX12 describe the use of multiple threads flying at the same time. nvidia does support them, with some limitations in number and preemption capabilities with respect to what AMD HW can.
This however does not mean that nvdia HW does not support Async compute or it is out of specs. AMD just made a better implementation of it.
Think it as it was for tessellation: nvidia implementation is way better than AMD one, but the fact that AMD can't go over certain values does not mean they are not DX11 compliant.
What you are looking here is a benchmark (more than a game) that stresses the multi-threaded capabilities of AMD HW. You can see that AMD is in a better position here. But the question is: how many other games are going to benefit from using such a technique and how many of them are going to implement such a heavy duty load?
We just don't know now. We have to wait to see if this technique can really improve performance (and thus image quality) in many other situations or it is just a show off for AMD (that has clearly partnered to make this feature even more heavy on nvidia HW).
When nvidia will star making developers using their HW accelerated Voxels we will start to see what feature is going to hit worse one another's HW and which is going to give better image quality improvements.
For now I just think this is a over used feature that like many other engine characteristics in DX11 is going to give advantage to one side rather than the other.
anubis44 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
That's because it never will be. You can't enable missing hardware.xTRICKYxx - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
I hate to be that guy, but I think it is time to dump the X79 platform for X99 or Z170.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Yep, Broadwell-E is on our list of things to do once it's out.Will Robinson - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
NVidia got rekt.DX12 lays the smak on Chizow's green dreams.
Roboyt0 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Do you have 3840x2160 results for the R9 290X per chance?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
No. We only ran 4K on Fury X and 980 Ti.Stuka87 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Really hating the colors of the graphs here. All grey, legend has one blue item, but no blue on the graph....Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
It's something of a limitation of the CMS. The color bar is the average; the grey bars are in the same order as they are in the legend: normal, medium, and heavy batch counts.Mr Perfect - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I was wondering what was up with that. Maybe someone could do a little MS-Paint bucket fill on the images before publishing? :)