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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  • Destoya - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    I feel like you're ignoring cards like the 1050ti/1050 in order to better match your narrative. Both of those require no power connectors (75W TDP) and will reach 1080p60 easily for modern AAA games and 144 FPS on esports titles. Yes, both companies are making power hungry monster cards to satisfy high-end demand that get a lot of headlines, but the chip designs scale down incredibly well. Performance for low/mid-end systems has never been as good as it is now.
  • The_Assimilator - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    Yes yes, everybody should still be using teletype terminals and typewriters. Or even better, go back to scratching lines into cave walls with rocks, because that uses no power and creates no heat.
  • Lord of the Bored - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    Actually, it does create heat. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress.
  • catavalon21 - Thursday, January 10, 2019 - link

    +1
  • sonny73n - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    Graphic and resolution mean the world to them because they have no life.
  • theuglyman0war - Saturday, November 4, 2017 - link

    I thought it was because God gave us two eyes that can see? ( the same reason I get my prescription glasses updated every year. Fidelity. )

    Is Lo Fi hip again?
  • Ranger1065 - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    You should be removed ASAP dear Ciccio.
  • TheJian - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Bought mine at $499 (EVGA FTW2). Don't feel gouged at all. If it's gouging, they'd still be on the shelf. I'm guessing they'll be out of stock shortly. If they priced like you want, they'd have quarterly reports like AMD.. ROFL. That should not be the goal for NV, but rather to price as high as the market will accept...PERIOD. It is actually their JOB to do this.

    Sounds like you need to upgrade your job so you can afford better toys ;) AMD has lost $8B in the last 2 decades and looks like they only made money for a single quarter this time. They are predicting a down Q yet again (how can you have a bad xmas Q?) and just after all these launches. YOU ARE PRICING YOUR STUFF TOO LOW AMD!
  • bill.rookard - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    Well, that's not entirely accurate, AMD has had some nominally profitable quarters before this - not to the level of Intel for sure, but saying they've lost money every single quarter in the past 20 years is patently untrue. There were many times 'in the past two decades' when they were actually eating Intel's lunch, so enough of the hyperbole.

    Yes, they've not had an easy time since then, and have been in the dumps especially with their previous generation designs which, well, sucked. (caveat, the 8 core 8000 series actually did well on video encoding but that wasn't nearly enough)

    As for pricing stuff too low? They HAVE to right now. Their issue is one of market share, and with their previous generation u-arch it couldn't remotely compete with Intel, and that pitiful share is the result. Now that they have a u-arch which is close to parity from power and performance, just wait to see what happens in the notebook space where the Intel IGP is pitifully bad compared to the Mobile Vega. Besides - the main 'desktop' space is, while not dying, it is without a doubt somewhat stagnant as most people have a laptop which is powerful enough to get stuff done, while being portable.

    That is the larger market, and one that the Ryzen APU's will have a much better chance at picking up share in.
  • webdoctors - Thursday, November 2, 2017 - link

    You;re right, there was I guess maybe 40% quarters were profitable last 10 years:

    https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/eps

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