Ashes of the Singularity DirectX 12 Graphics Performance Analysis

Final Thoughts

Ashes of the Singularity is a resounding victory for AMD across numerous performance tiers and illustrates the staggering gains when using the DirectX 12 API. It’s important to reiterate that DirectX 12 is relatively new and we’ll have to test more titles in the future to see how much of an advantage AMD has. Evidently, AMD’s work on Mantle and the GCN’s exceptional support for asynchronous compute is a major turning point for the company. Of course, it greatly depends if future games will adopt this technology, but I’m fairly confident that AMD’s product lineup should become more competitive over time due to improved DirectX 12 adoption among developers. AMD has compiled an extensive framework around DirectX 12 and there’s a great deal of work to do from NVIDIA to catch up.

Throughout the testing procedure, AMD’s flagship remained on top by defeating the Titan X and one of the best GTX 980Ti cards around. This is a marvellous result and AMD deserves a great deal of credit for reaching the top position. Another highlight steams from the R9 Nano which consistently outperformed the Titan X at higher resolutions and was only a tiny amount behind during 1920×1080 testing. It’s astonishing when you consider the significantly cheaper price point and compact form factor. The R9 390 easily surpassed the GTX 980 and GTX 970 which makes it a stunning choice for users looking to find superb performance without spending too much. Even the lower end options from AMD including the R9 380 exceeded my expectations and trounced NVIDIA’s budget GPUs.

Of course, it’s not all terrible news for NVIDIA because they’ve still managed to offer good performance on the higher end cards. However, the mid-lower class of products do not fare very well compared to their AMD rivals. In an ideal world, I’d recommend opting for the R9 390 or above to maintain a fluid frame-rate with high details. If I had to suggest the best card right now for this particular title and taking any price to performance concerns into consideration, it would be the R9 390. To summarise, Ashes of the Singularity proves the notion that AMD cards are beautifully suited towards DirectX 12 and it’s highly likely that they’ll have a significant performance boost compared to NVIDIA’s current offerings. Well done AMD!

Thank you to all our partners who provided the hardware and software that made this performance analysis possible.