Ashes of the Singularity DX12 Updates

 

Stardock released Beta 2 of its upcoming RTS title Ashes of the Singularity today.  This update brings something that many pc gamers have been curious about and anxious to try for themselves, Explicit Multi Adapter Support and full Asynchronous Compute.

“With this update, players can improve game performance by adding another video card,” said Dan Baker, Chief Scientist at Oxide Games. “As long as the two cards are reasonably similar in performance, they can be of any model or brand including mixing AMD and NVidia cards together. Players just insert the additional video card and enable it via the game’s video options panel.”

What is Explicit Multi-Adapter?  EMA is the ability for DX12 and your system to not only recognize that there are multiple gpus installed but use them, regardless of vendor or class.  So you could pair any number of combinations of Radeon and Geforce gpus.  Theoretically you could also combine Intel’s igpu with a dedicated graphics card, but I had no luck with that on either our z87 test bench or our z170 setup as of now, but upcoming releases may make this possible.  Stardock mentions the importance of keeping the cards similar in performance when mixing them as they’re using Split-Frame Rendering and will be using the gpus in parallel, so one being significantly stronger can have a very negative impact on performance as we’ll see later.

This benchmark should be accessible through the newly updated display preferences option menu in the game.

Another DX12 implementation that has made its way into this update is Multi-Threaded Command Buffer Recording.  With the rise of multi core processors in the market it’s time we see better use of those cores.  Typically with DX11 a single core handles most of the driver and API interpretation leaving little room for the processor to handle the actual game code.  DX12 is utilizing the command buffer to overhaul this in five ways.

• Overhead is significantly reduced by moving the driver and API code to any available CPU thread
• The absolute time required to complete complex CPU tasks is notably reduced
• Game workloads can be meaningfully distributed across more than four cores
• New “bandwidth” on the CPU allows for higher peak draw calls, enabling more detailed and immersive game worlds
• All available CPU core man now “talk” to the graphics card simultaneously

This could end up being a great feature for those still holding on to their six and eight core FX series processors, but in reality everyone will benefit from it.

 

Our Testing

 

Testing with limited resources we wanted to bring the most comprehensive results that we could.

We had a small collection of gpus; R9 285 (2gb), R9 Nano, and a R9 295x2 (wouldn’t work under dx12 except for one core when paired with the Nano) All tests were done with Async Compute enabled.

We tested across three platforms;

• a88x with A10 7870k
• z87 with i7 4770k
• z170 with i5 6400

All processors and graphics cards were ran at stock speeds

The remaining components of each setup used;

• Skill Trident X 2x8gb DDR3 2400mhz
• Skill Trident Z 2x8gb (ran at 2133mhz)
• Visiontek 240gb miniSSD
• CoolerMaster V1200 Platinum PSU
• Sapphire R9 285 ITX compact (2gb)
• AMD Radeon R9 Nano

Driver Packaging Version provided by AMD for these tests

15.301-160210a-299275E

 

The benchmark for AotS was run with the ‘STANDARD’ preset at 1080p across all processor and graphics card configurations.

 

We started off with the A10 7870k running through both DX11 and DX12 with first the R9 285 then the R9 Nano and finished off with seeing where Explicit Multi-Adapter stands at the moment.

Interestingly enough the R9 285 takes a serious pounding in this test.  The R9 285 does so bad to the point that even the iGPU in EMA that was able to boost it up whereas the disparity between the Nano and the iGPU really show that this isn’t a recommended configuration and highly inadvisable.

 

The i5 puts up some much better numbers, even at a much lower clock speed showing that IPC is still important in the world of DX12.  We were not able to run EMA with the intel HD530 as the game did not recognize the iGPU.

Still the R9 285 takes a beating.  This time we see the Nano making a massive leap showing the api is taking full advantage of the total system.

 

With the i7 we see very similar results to the i5, but this time we toss in a curve ball to the mix.  We pair the R9 Nano and the R9 285 then again with the R9 Nano and a R9 290x.  The Results were interesting to say the least.

  

While the Nano+285 yields no improvement, staying within margin of error, the R9 Nano and R9 290x show some decent games, but mostly noticeable in the Medium and Heavy Batches.  This shows how well the load is handled across both graphics cards as the load increases.

 

Taking a look back comparing the i5 and i7, looks like hyper-threading doesn’t do much good here.

*keep in mind the i5 6400 operates at 2.7ghz-3.2ghz boost and the i7 4770k runs at 3.5ghz-3.9ghz boost.*

 

Conclusion So Far

It’s good to these DX12 features finally available to the public and they are working. There’s still a road to go before these features are out of Beta and more available in other titles we could see a shift in upgrade paths where people are holding on to their old gpu for a bit longer as well as making some interesting combinations.  We would love to have tested along with an Nvidia gpu, but the only one available at the time is a GTX 770 but it wouldn’t launch in DX12 so we were unable to compile any results from that configuration.

 

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