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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rarson - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
Yeah, because people who bought a 980 Ti are already looking to replace them...Aspiring Techie - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
I'm pretty sure that Nvidia's Pascal cards will be optimized for DX12. Still, this gives AMD a slight advantage, which they need pretty badly now.testbug00 - Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - link
*laughs*Pascal is more of the same as Maxwell when it comes to gaming.
Mondozai - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Pascal is heavily compute-oriented, which will affect how the gaming lineup arch will be built. Do your homework.testbug00 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
Sorry, Maxwell already can support packed FP16 operations at 2x the rate of FP32 with X1.The rat of compute will be pretty much exclusive to GP100. Like how Kepler had a gaming line and GK110 for compute.
MattKa - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
*laughs*I'd like to borrow your crystal ball...
You lying sack of shit. Stop making things up you retarded ass face.
testbug00 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
What does Pascal have over Maxwell according to Nvidia again? Bolted on FP64 units?CiccioB - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
I have not read anything about Pascal from nvidia outside the FP16 capabilities that are HPC oriented (deep learning).Where have you read anything about how Pascal cores/SMX/cache and memory controller are organized? Are they still using crossbar or they finally passed to a ring bus? Are caches bigger or faster? What are the ratio of cores/ROPs/TMUs? How much bandwidth for each core? How much has the compressed memory technology improved? Have cores doubled the ALUs or they have made more independent core? How much independent? Is the HW scheduler now able to preempt the graphics thread or it still can't? How many threads can it support? Is the Voxel support better and able to be used heavily in scenes to make global illumination quality difference?
I have not read anything about this points. Have you some more info about them?
Because what I could see is that at a first glance even Maxwell was not really different than Kepler. But in reality the performance were quite different in many ways.
I think you really do not know anything about what you are talking about,.
You are just expressing your desire and hopes like any other fanboy as a mirror of the frustration you have suffered all these years with the less capable AMD architecture you have been using up to now. You just hop nvidia has stopped and AMD finally made a step forward. It may be you are right. But you can't say now, nor I would going telling such stupid thing you were saying without anything as a fact.
anubis44 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
I think nVidia's been caught with their pants down, and Pascal doesn't have hardware schedulers to perform async compute, either. It may be that AMD has seriously beaten them this time.anubis44 - Thursday, February 25, 2016 - link
nVidia wasn't expecting AMD to force Microsoft's hand and release DX12 so soon. I have a feeling Pascal, like Maxwell, doesn't have hardware schedulers, either. It's beginning to look like nVidia's been check-mated by AMD here.