Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)

A veteran from both our 2016 and 2017 game lists, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation remains the DirectX 12 trailblazer, with developer Oxide Games tailoring and designing the Nitrous Engine around such low-level APIs. The game makes the most of DX12's key features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threaded work submission and high batch counts. And with full Vulkan support, Ashes provides a good common ground between the forward-looking APIs of today. Its built-in benchmark tool is still one of the most versatile ways of measuring in-game workloads in terms of output data, automation, and analysis; by offering such a tool publicly and as part-and-parcel of the game, it's an example that other developers should take note of.

Settings and methodology remain identical from its usage in the 2016 GPU suite. To note, we are utilizing the original Ashes Extreme graphical preset, which compares to the current one with MSAA dialed down from x4 to x2, as well as adjusting Texture Rank (MipsToRemove in settings.ini).

Ashes 1920x1080 2560x1440 3840x2160
Average FPS
99th Percentile

For Ashes, the 20 series fare a little worse in their gains over the 10 series, with an advantage at 4K around 14 to 22%. Here, the Founders Edition power and clock tweaks are essential in avoiding the 2080 FE outright losing to the 1080 Ti, though our results are putting the Founders Editions essentially neck-and-neck.

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  • beisat - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Very nice review, by far the best one I've read. Thanks for that.
    How likely do you think the launch of another generation is in 2019 from Nvidia / and or something competitive from AMD based on 7nm?

    I currently have gtx970, skipped the Pascal generation and was waiting for Turing. But I don't like being an early adopter and feel that for pure rasterisation, these cards aren't worth it. Yes they are more powerful then the 10er series I skipped, but they also costs more - so performance pro $$$ is similar, and I'm not willing to pay the same amout of $$$ for the same performance as I would have 2 years ago.
    Guess I'll just have to stick it out with my 970 at 1080p?
  • dguy6789 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 are highly disappointing.
  • V900 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    That’s a rather debatable take that most hardware sites and tech-journalists would disagree with.

    But would do they know, amirite?
  • dguy6789 - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    Just about every review of these cards states that right now they're disappointing and we need to wait and see how ray tracing games pan out to see if that will change.

    We waited this many years to have the smallest generation to generation performance jump we have ever seen. Price went way up too. The cards are hotter and use a more power which makes me question how long they last before they die.

    The weird niche Nvidia "features" these cards have will end up like PhysX.

    The performance you get for what you pay for a 2080 or 2080 Ti is simply terrible.
  • dguy6789 - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    Not to mention that Nvidia's stock was just downgraded due to the performance of the 2080 and 2080 Ti.
  • mapesdhs - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    V900, you've posted a lot stuff here that was itself debatable, but that comment was just nonsense. I don't believe for a moment you think most tech sites think these cards are a worthy buy. The vast majority of reviews have been generally or heavily negative. I therefore conclude troll.
  • hammer256 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Oof, still on the 12nm process. Which frankly is quite remarkable how much rasterization performance they were able to squeeze out, while putting in the tensor and ray tracing cores. The huge dies are not surprising in that regard. In the end, architectural efficiency can only go so far, and the fundamental limit is still on transistor budget.
    With that said, I'm guessing there's going to be a 7nm refresh pretty soon-ish? I would wait...
  • V900 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    You might have to wait a long time then.

    Don’t see a 7nm refresh on the horizon. Maybe in a year, probably not until 2020.

    *There isn’t any HP/high density 7nm process available right now. (The only 7nm product shipping right now is the A12. And that’s a low power/mobile process. The 7nm HP processes are all in various form of pre-production/research.

    *Price. 7nm processes are going to be expensive. And the Turing dies are gigantic, and already expensive to make on its current node. That means that Nvidia will most likely wait with a 7nm Turing until proces have come down, and the process is more mature.

    *And then there’s the lack of competition: AMD doesn’t have anything even close to the 2080 right now, and won’t for a good 3 years if Navi is a mid-range GPU. As long as the 2080Ti is the king of performance, there’s no reason for Nvidia to rush to a smaller process.
  • Zoolook - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    Kirin 980 has been shipping for a while, should be in stores in two weeks, we know that atleast Vega was sampling in June, so it depends on the allocation at TSMC it's not 100% Apple.
  • Antoine. - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    The assumption under which this article operates that RTX2080 should be compared to GTX1080 and RTX2080TI to GTX1080TI is a disgrace. It allows you to be overly satisfied with performance evolutions between GPUS with a vastly different price tag! It just shows that you completely bought the BS renaming of Titan into Ti's. Of course the next gen Titan is going to perform better than the previous generation's Ti ! Such a gullible take on these new products cannot be by sheer stupidity alone.

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