The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTAshes 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).
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data.
For the Radeon VII, the intended goal was to equal or trade blows with the RTX 2080. The situation in Ashes: Escalation is still in line with that intention at 4K, where despite trailing the GTX 1080 Ti FE/RTX 2080 duo is comfortably ahead of the RTX 2070 and RX Vega 64. The lead begins to dwindle at lower resolutions, but the Radeon VII can still claim a 20% speedup at 1440p over the RX Vega 64.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
289 Comments
View All Comments
Manch - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
My bad on Wolf. I thought it was. It's on XB1 which is DX12 and DX12 supt was confirmed by a few places so I didn't check further.As for Vulkan Games, off the top of my head(whats in my library), TWS:ToB, TW: Warhammer II (should have been in my table..oops), Warhamer 40K DoW III, Serious SAM VR games, x-plane. I'm sure there are others. Easy to look up.
IMO FPS should not be the definitive test for all API's. Variety is always nice.
Cherry pick my mistakes but my point stands. I get the test bed needs to be locked down so consistent results can be achieved. Anandtech needs to be able to give specific measurable and repeatable results and they do that. I'm just merely expressed my desire to see a more balanced test suite in regards to APIs & games that are design for NVidia or AMD GPU's.
eddman - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Are you basing that on personal experience or simply getting the info from vulkan's wikipedia page, without checking the platform column?TWS:ToB, TW: Warhammer II and Warhamer 40K DoW III use vulkan only on linux.
Despite the vulkan addition, Serious sam games are old, non-demanding and not suitable for benchmarking.
X-plane does not support vulkan yet; it's a work-in-progress. Still, even if it does add it eventually, it too is not suitable for benchmarking.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
The benchmark suite gets updated on a roughly yearly basis. It was last updated for the Turing launch, so we're only about 5 months into it. As part of ensuring we cover a reasonable selection of genres, these were the best games available in the fall of 2018.The next time we update it will presumably be for AMD's Navi launch, assuming that still happens in 2019. Though it's never too early to suggest what games you'd like to see.
eva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Anthem, metro Exodus, The Division 2, Rage 2, Mortal Kombat 11krazyfrog - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
Half-Life 3SeannyB - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I would like to see a title from each of the general purpose engines, namely UE4 and Unity.Korguz - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
maybe i am the only one here.. but the games AT tests... i dont play ANY of them :-)Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Out of curiosity, what do you play?Korguz - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
WOW, Starcraft 2 Diablo 3 and some older games... games that dont really " need " a card like this.. my current asus strix 1060, plays these just fine at almost max eye candy... the only game i can think of that i have, and play that might need this card.. is Supreme commander, but im not sure if that game needs a strong cpu, or gpu, maybe a bit of both...Holliday75 - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Love me some Supreme Commander. Solid followup to Total Annihilation. As to its performance I think its more CPU based and quite frankly the engine is not optimized for modern hardware.