Ashes 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

CPU Gaming Performance: Civilization 6 CPU Gaming Performance: Shadow of Mordor
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  • sld - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    In speech: "grateful" to AMD for reinvigorating competition

    In deed: gives money to Intel, effectively taking part in keeping AMD down for that bit longer, maybe causing them to return to non-competitive state, upon which AMD is blamed for being non-competitive once more.

    The Invisible Hand doesn't seem so wise, sometimes.
  • kooya - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link

    Hear, hear
  • WB312 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    AMD did a fantastic job with Ryzen while Intel were busy milking their customers dry. We should support AMD when they need us most. If AMD goes down it would suck not for the industry but technology as a whole.
  • leexgx - Monday, October 16, 2017 - link

    at least you can enable MCE to make all cores run at 4.6Ghz (make sure you got a good cooler) 8700K would allow you to goto 4.9-5.1Ghz with very good cooling
  • lordken - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    what a "brilliant" asshardware , your Kudos worth shit to amd as they cant fund further r&d with it. But sure, run to support your milking master because they finally bothered to release, after 10 years, 4+ core for mainstream...
  • Budburnicus - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link

    Salty salty salty people! AMD are big boys too, they can fight for themselves. It is called a FREE MARKET, and until Ryzen, AMD had nothing to even come within spitting distance of an i7-2600k!

    Which is coincidentally what I upgraded to my 8700k from. Running 4.8 GHZ on all cores for now, I still have plenty of thermal room, so once more people have figured out all the minute settings, I will just leave it at 4.8 til then! Also, Firestrike! https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/23022903
    CPU-Z: https://valid.x86.fr/nkr5vi

    Thas me, ahead of 96% of all results! And that single threaded perf, is totally insane - as is multi-core, nothing short of 16+ threads can touch it.
  • Zingam - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    I like how Ryzen 5 1600 beats the much higher TDP and much higher priced Coffee Lake in Civ Vl.

    This should ring a bell how software is written!!!
  • mkaibear - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    ...cherry pick one benchmark, claim that it's the only one that matters...

    *cough*AMD fanboy*cough*
  • Zingam - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link

    I don't own anything AMD!

    Drink some water and stop that coughing!
  • mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    :D

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