Wrap Upwards: Making Some Sense of the Results

Ashes of the Singularity looks to be an awesome RTS game and an exciting insight into what DX12 has to offering. Gamers should conduct in mind that this is still just a unmarried DX12 game and is unlikely to stand for DX12 performance every bit a whole -- no single game could. Equally is the instance with DX11 gaming, it'southward likely that some DX12 games will favor AMD while others prefer Nvidia.

Putting the blinders on and looking specifically at Ashes of the Singularity, is Nvidia as doomed as AMD fanboys would take you believe? No, we wouldn't say so.

Although Nvidia does go backwards in DX12 as AMD goes forrad, the margins are far from catastrophic. Have the GTX 980 Ti vs. Fury X battle at 1080p for example. Under DX11 the 980 Ti is 15% faster while it is but 2% faster when using DX12. The exact same affair was seen when comparing the GTX 980 and R9 390X.

There has been a lot of confusion surrounding Ashes of the Singularity's operation since the kickoff benchmarks were released a few months agone by a select few tech sites. For instance, Ars Technica'southward results paint a different picture than ours, showing that at 1440p the Radeon 290X gained over twoscore% functioning when using DX12 instead of DX11, going from 28fps to 40fps.

Meanwhile, in our tests, using a very similar GPU (the 390X) going from DX11 to DX12 simply resulted in a v% increase. The huge difference is explained past the fact that AMD has improved their DX11 functioning in recent weeks/months, so the gap has been reduced considerably. Moving up to 4K, the margins get even narrower and the DX12 performance looks very similar to what we come to expect from a DX11 championship between the various GPUs.

It's worth noting that our GPU testing was conducted with the ultra-fast Core i7-6700K processor, which is why DX12 didn't show vast improvements over DX11 -- there were loads of processing power available. That said, when we turned to test different CPUs, even with a Core i3 processor we had to reduce the graphics settings drastically to alleviate the GPU bottleneck.

The medium quality settings provided some rather shocking results for the AMD FX-8350 as it trailed the Core i3-6100 by a wide margin, somewhat akin to sure DX11 titles such every bit Thief. As well the results seen when using the R9 Fury 10 really highlighted AMD's driver overhead upshot using DX11 with a weaker processor.

Information technology'south hard to decide exactly just how much of an improvement DX12 makes over DX11 in Ashes of the Singularity.

Evidently Nvidia graphics cards are of no assistance here as they go backwards. On the AMD side, they oasis't necessarily optimized every bit heavily for DX11 in Ashes of the Singularity. This makes sense every bit AMD isn't looking to push asynchronous shading to developers considering the company's compages is well suited for the task. It'south doing this because information technology costs them far less in driver research and development every bit asynchronous shading enables the GCN compages to attain almost full efficiency without requiring a driver.

Nvidia has heavily optimized its DX11 driver for Ashes of the Singularity while there is piffling it can practice to optimize its driver for DX12 every bit the game engine communicates virtually directly with the GPU. The company is limited by its Maxwell architecture which suffers from a call bottleneck due to the game beingness programmed for thread parallelism. Nvidia is dependent on game developers to make efficient use of the Maxwell compages as best they tin, so don't expect to see DirectX 12 driver improvements from squad green.

For now it seems DX12 is doing a decent job of leveling the playing field and we can't wait to see more than titles tapping the tech in the near future.