Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)

A veteran from our 2016 game list, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation continues to be the DirectX 12 trailblazer, with developer Oxide Games tailoring and designing the Nitrous Engine around such low-level APIs. Ashes remains fresh for us in many ways: Escalation was released as a standalone expansion in November 2016 and was eventually merged into the base game in February 2017, while August 2017's v2.4 brought Vulkan support. Of all of the games in our benchmark suite, this is the game making the best use of DirectX 12’s various features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threaded work submission and high batch counts. While what we see can’t be extrapolated to all DirectX 12 games, it gives us a very interesting look at what we might expect in the future.

Settings and methodology remain identical from its usage in the 2016 GPU suite. To note, the latest version of Ashes has changed the Extreme graphical preset, dialing down MSAA from x4 to x2, as well as adjusting Texture Rank (MipsToRemove in settings.ini).

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation - 3840x2160 - Extreme QualityAshes of the Singularity: Escalation - 2560x1440 - Extreme QualityAshes of the Singularity: Escalation - 1920x1080 - Extreme QualityAshes: Escalation - 99th Percentile - 3840x2160 - Extreme QualityAshes: Escalation - 99th Percentile - 2560x1440 - Extreme QualityAshes: Escalation - 99th Percentile - 1920x1080 - Extreme Quality

Here, the GTX 1070 Ti cleanly beats Vega 56, and even surpasses Vega 64 at sub-4K resolutions. While normally an AMD hardware favoring game, driver improvements over the past few months seem to have given the lead over to NVIDIA.

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  • moxin - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Still think it's a bit expensive
  • Spunjji - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Agreed. This should be 1070 price, 1070 down to the 970's original MSRP... Anything less is gouging.
  • Yojimbo - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    I think it should cost $20.
  • edlee - Friday, January 12, 2018 - link

    This mining rush might kill the pc gaming industry, when a gamer cannot find a single high performance card at msrp prices, they will just flock to the xbox one x or ps4 pro, this is outrageous.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Hey everyone, please watch your language. (not you specifically, Spunjji, I removed a comment below you)
  • CiccioB - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    I think that any comment whining about prices should be removed ASAP.
  • Ratman6161 - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    I'm not a gamer so I'm more wide eyed at a the idea of a video card that draws 80 watts at idle and over 300 under load...more than my whole system under load. And upwards of $500? Wow. I guess I'm sort of glad I'm not a gamer. :)
  • DanNeely - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Those are total system numbers, not the card itself.
  • CaedenV - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    The card by itself idles at ~20W and load at ~250W

    Still quite a bit compared to a small desktop or a laptop though lol
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Yup, those power numbers are terrible. The desire for improvement in visual quality and competition between the two remaining dGPU manufactures has certainly done us no favors when it comes to electrical consumption and waste heat generation in modern PCs. Sadly, people often forget that good graphics don't automatically imply tons of fun will be had at the keyboard and they consequently create demand that causes a positive feedback loop that make 200+ watt TDP GPUs viable products. I remember the many hours I killed playing games on my Palm IIIxe and it needed a new pair of AAA batteries once every 3 or so weeks. Not everyone feels that way though and for an obviously large number of consumer buyers, graphics and resolution mean the world to them no matter the price of entry or the power consumption.

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