Ashes of the Singularity DX12 Benchmarks With AMD and NVIDIA

By Nathan Kirsch

Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark II DX12 Testing

Stardock and Oxide Games released the Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark I in the Fall of 2015 and we ran some tests with the first non-synthetic Direcxt12 benchmark test and found some very interesting results. Ashes of the Singularity uses the Nitrous Engine that is capable of using many CPU cores, so this benchmark should be a good way to look at how current video cards from AMD and NVIDIA will perform on a DX12 game title that has parallel rendering, asynchronous compute and even explicit multi-GPU support. Last week we were given access to the new Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark II tool that has been updated to better replicate real world user scenarios.

Heres whats new:

  1. Explicit Multi-GPU. You can now insert an additional video card into your PC and increase performance by up to 2x. Explicit Multi-GPU allows gamers to use an AMD card and an Nvidia card in the same system.
  2. Significant general performance optimizations.
  3. The addition of the games Substrate faction in the benchmark.
  4. Increased the benchmark’s overall load to test expanded gameplay features.
  5. New graphics effects.
  6. Advanced use of D3D12 multi queue and signaling mechanisms. This is often referred to as asynchronous compute.

Ashes of the Singularity

We started to benchmark a handful of video cards on the new Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark II tool, but AMD was late to the driver game again and that Radeon Software Edition 16.2 video card drivers were optimized for this benchmark. Once we got done running the AMD benchmark numbers NVIDIA released GeForce 362.00 WHQL drivers, so we went back and updated all of our numbers again to ensure both AMD and NVIDIA were given a fair shake with the latest drivers. Since we were holding the article to ensure we were using the latest drivers from AMD what harm was there in delaying it a couple more days for NVIDIA.

DX12 GPUs Tested
The six video cards that we tested on DX12

For testing we pulled out six video cards that we wanted to look at with three being from AMD and two being from NVIDIA. We tried to pair cards together at price points to show DX12 performance at three different price points on current video cards.

Flagship Video Cards – $599+

High-End Graphics Cards – $300 – $350

Mainstream Graphics Cards – $189 – $229

Let’s take a look at the test system and then see how these cards performed at 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 3840 x 2160 screen resolutions!