General Gaming Article |
- Reflecting Back on Our Old Dream Machine 2015 Predictions
- Newegg Daily Deals: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit OEM, BenQ 27-Inch Monitor, and More!
- Windows 10 Grabs 5 Percent of PC Market in First Month
- Seagate Shoehorns 2TB of Storage into 7mm Laptop Hard Drive
- Lenovo Expands Business Lineup with New ThinkPad E Laptops
- Benchmarked: Ashes of the Singularity
| Reflecting Back on Our Old Dream Machine 2015 Predictions Posted: 01 Sep 2015 05:00 PM PDT The good, the bad, and the wrong predictionsWay back in 2011, the old staff at Maximum PC predicted what Dream Machine 2015 would look like. Well, now that Dream Machine 2015 is officially here, we thought we would look back at our predictions to see how we did. Dream Machine 2015 teaser video You'll see a lot of the old staff pick specific components for Dream Machine 2015 below, but equally interesting to read are their general predictions of the tech industry as a whole. Remember that back in 2011, tablets had just splashed on to the scene and were the new hotness. Now, tablet sales have crashed. With that said, let's take a stroll back through memory lane, shall we? Nathan Edwards (former Senior Associate Editor): "First, it'll still be a desktop computer" Nathan was right about that one. "...but it'll probably be smaller. As laptops and tablets gain prominence in the lives of average users, desktops will become more and more the domain of the power user, but that doesn't mean they'll stay as huge as they are. I predict the 2015 Dream Machine will have a micro-ATX or Mini-ITX motherboard" Nope. Our Dream Machine uses a big full-tower chassis. "[it will use] a 24-core processor" Not quite. Our 5960X only has eight actual cores, but it does have 16 threads. "maybe 48GB of RAM" We actually used 64GB of RAM! "The GPUs it does have might not be PCIe at all—optical Light Peak could have superseded it by then." Nope. We're still using PCIe. This is how Dream Machine 2015 ended up looking. "The DM will also have at least 1TB of solid-state storage, though I'm sure it'll still have mechanical drives for mass storage." Right you are, Nathan. This year's Dream Machine actually has four one-terabyte SSDs and four six-terabyte HDDs. "Most computers of 2015 will be glorified docks for smartphones and tablets." Not exactly. Traditional tablets are a fading market. There has been some traction with two-in-ones, however. "Dream Machine, though it'll surely have a phone dock" Nope. "30-inch panel" We ended up going with a 27-inch (but it's a beautiful 5K one). "Mechanical keyboard" Yep. "laser mouse" Yep. "a really great headset" Yep. Alex Castle (former Online Managing Editor): "It'll still feature an x86 processor, but with 12 or more physical cores running at more than 5 GHz." Right about the x86 processor, wrong about the 12 physical cores, as our CPU only has 8 physical cores. And we couldn't reach 5GHz unfortunately, but 4.5GHz isn't terribly far off. "You'll find at least 64GB of RAM (probably more) in the system, and one or more terabyte-class SSDs." Whoa. We used 64GB of RAM on the dot and have four terabyte-class SSDs! "If we're even still bothering with HDDs and that point, we'll only need one for massive capacity storage." Nope. We've got four massive 6TB HDDs. "I don't think Dream Machine 2015 will feature any optical drives. " Good riddance, we say! The actual innards of Dream Machine 2015 Gordon Ung (former Senior Editor): "I'm going to say that the rig will run one single x86 processor sporting 12 cores." We're using a single x86 processor, but it only has eight physical cores. "It will be built on a 15nm process" The 5960X uses a 22nm process, we're afraid. "[It will] clock in at the 4.5GHz range (overclocked)" Did you summon a soothsayer here? That's right on the money! "The CPU or APU or BPU by then will have eaten even more graphics capability but discrete graphics will continue to be king." Right you are. "Switchable graphics, however, will finally work so the 90 percent of the time your PC isn't pushing heavy duty 3D needs, it'll be running on the on-board chip's graphics." Switchable graphics is par the course for gaming notebooks, but not so true for desktops. "The box will likely sport 64GB of DDR4/3333" Very close. 64GB of DDR4 clocked at 2,800MHz. "As I said, discrete graphics will still be king for anyone who actually cares about gaming and DM2015 will sport no fewer than two GPUs in the PCIe 4.0 slots. " Right about having at least two GPUs, but we're still on PCIe gen 3. "I'd guess it'll have two 2TB SSDs in RAID 0" We've got four one-terabyte SSDs in RAID 0, so that's close. "Hard drives will continue to handle bulk store with say, a total of three 9TB drives for 27TB of storage." Again. Very close. We've got four 6TB HDDs for a total of 24TB of hard drive space. "USB 4.0 running Thunderbolt will be integrated into the chipset as well." Nope. No Thunderbolt and we're running a bunch of USB 3.0. "The PSU, interestingly, will continue to be topped out at 1,500 watts as there's simply no where to go from there." Close, but 1,600 watts is actually what it generally tops off at in the United States, and that's what we ended up using. "The panel will support native 4K or 4096x2160 pixels and 120Hz capability for 3D and touch capability." While they do make 4K panels that run at 120Hz, our panel runs at 5K with an insane resolution of 5120x2880. It's also a 60Hz panel with no touch capability. Markkus Rovito (former Online Editor of Maximum Tech): "We'll begin with a motherboard accommodating 96GB of RAM" We ended up going with 64GBs. "The board includes four Thunderbolt slots, as well as plenty of USB 4.1 and SATA7 ports, as well." Nope. Sorry. "For storage, we've finally gone all solid-state. Three 3TB SSDs make a respectable 9TB data dump." Unfortunately, this year's DM "only" had 4TBs of SSDs…. "Dual octa-core processors clocked at 5.5GHz" Nope. One octa-core processor clocked at 4.5GHz. "Four graphics cards clocked at 2GHz each " We did end up using four graphics cards, but our GPUs carried base core clocks of 1,207MHz, not 2GHz. Katherine Stevenson: "In 2015 there may very well be large numbers of people who don't own a desktop PC, or even a notebook, as smartphones are showing all signs of evolving into pocket-size powerhouses capable of meeting many computing needs on their own." It's true that smartphones have become ultra popular around the world, but most people still use either a desktop PC or notebook for their productivity needs. "It's quite likely, however, that the Dream Machine of 2015 will be smaller than DMs past, while packing way more power." Smaller? Not quite. With a chassis that measures 11.2x26x25.7 inches, this Dream Machine is plenty big. Way more power? You bet! "Discrete graphics cards will probably be obsolete" It's true that Intel and AMD have been gaining traction with integrated graphics, but they still have a lot of ground to cover, especially as it pertains to Dream Machine. "This mighty mite will be paired with a large, high-res display, possibly curved, that's capable of displaying 3D content sans glasses and 4K video in all its glory." High-res display: yes. Curved, 3D, and 4K: no. The latter of which is incorrect because we've gone with a 5K monitor! Amber Bouman (former Online Features Editor): "Dream Machine 2015 will almost certainly feature a glasses-free 3D display of some sort, and with the average display size creeping ever larger, the display in question will likely be 30+ inches." Nope, and 3D monitors never picked up much steam. "Maybe 35 or 37 inches, and there will be at least two monitors." We went with a single, but beautiful monitor, and they still don't really make monitors that big. "I also think that there will be some type of mobile aspect to it—an associated tablet that docks to the PC, or a smartphone dock... perhaps some sort of flexible tablet? Perhaps a projected hologram or 3D image? Either way, the mobile aspect will be impossible to ignore or exclude." Nope. Sorry. "I'm also thinking—and this is pure speculation—improved/increased voice controls, better/more cloud adaptation freeing up memory and hard drive space, and heavy home integrations, i.e., controlling your front door, home theatre, or alarm system with your PC." Windows 10 does support Cortana and you can get more cloud storage to free up hard drive space, but it probably isn't that sophisticated. The whole upcoming "Internet of Things" thing seems to be touching upon your later prediction, though. Jon Phillips "I wouldn't hazard to posit anything about the specific components we might find in Dream Machine 2015. But I do think that on the CPU side of things, the so-called "power wall" will continue to force Intel and AMD to mitigate clock speed limitations with multi-core designs. How many cores exactly? I'll reserve speculation!" A fair, but safe assumption. "Sure, new process technologies will eventually emerge that allow us to handle thermals and power issues at very fast frequencies, but don't expect any mass-market breakthroughs within the next four years." This is largely true. "All that said, I'm willing to state with utmost certainty that the CPU in DM2015 will be running an X86 architecture. It won't be ARM so that we can all play the desktop version of Angry Birds 4." That's correct. "And we'll probably see some type of iteration of Thunderbolt." Not on this Dream Machine, unfortunately. "And while notebook, tablets, and even smartphones will continue to chip away at desktop sales, we'll still see a thriving PC hardware enthusiast community in 2015, and we'll continue to be using desktops for games, video editing, and mundane office crap. " Right you are. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Newegg Daily Deals: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit OEM, BenQ 27-Inch Monitor, and More! Posted: 01 Sep 2015 12:55 PM PDT Top Deal: Oh sure, you can turn off automatic app updates in the Home version of Windows 10, but those security updates are still forced. The problem with that, as we've seen, is that a bad update can ruin a user's day. Are you willing to take that chance every time Microsoft pushes out a security update? If not, then check out today's top deal for Microsoft Windows 10 64-Bit OEM for $130 with free shipping (normally $140 - use coupon code: [EMCAXAK87]). With the Pro version, you can delay updates for up to eight months and make sure everything's groovy before slapping them on your system. It also comes with features like BitLocker, Hyper-V, and more. Other Deals: Crucial BX100 2.5-inch 250GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for $80 with free shipping (normally $85 - use coupon code: [EMCAXAK22]) Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 LGA 2011-v3 Intel X99 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard for $230 with $4 shipping (normally $250 - use coupon code: [EMCAXAK42]) Acer G6 Series G246HLAbd Black 24-inch Monitor for $120 with free shipping (normally $130 - use coupon code: [EMCAXAK47]) BenQ GL2760H Black 27-inch 2ms TN Panel LCD Monitor for $170 with free shipping (normally $190 - use coupon code: [EMCAXAK54]) | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Windows 10 Grabs 5 Percent of PC Market in First Month Posted: 01 Sep 2015 12:40 PM PDT It's a numbers gameThe folks at StatCounter have compiled some usage statistics for Windows 10 and, not surprisingly, it's off to a faster start in its first month of availability than either Windows 8 or Windows 7. It's not surprising because Microsoft virtually ensured a fast start by giving the OS away as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8 users. What will be more telling is if all those free upgrades translate into long-term Windows 10 users or if those who upgraded ultimately decide to roll back. That's something to examine another time, but for now, Windows 10 is running on roughly 5 percent the world's PCs -- slightly less if you go by StatCounter's figures (4.88 percent) and slightly more if you go by data provided by NetApplications (5.21 percent). Rather than split hairs over small differences and make things more confusing than they need be, we'll stick with StatCounter's data from here on out That 4.88 percent figure compares favorably to Windows 8, which saw a measly 1 percent stake after being on the market for a month, and it's also better than Windows 7, which jumped out to a 4.05 percent share during its first month of availability. That's good news for Microsoft, though its Edge browser isn't seeing the same kind of interest. "Windows 10 came out of the traps much faster than Windows 8 and also exceeded the launch of Windows 7," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "While it's early days, usage of Edge by Windows 10 users has fallen by six percentage points from its peak the day after the global launch." What the data suggests is that users are curious about Edge and trying it out, but not sticking around. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Seagate Shoehorns 2TB of Storage into 7mm Laptop Hard Drive Posted: 01 Sep 2015 11:51 AM PDT Pushing more capacity into tiny form factors Even though the mobile market is benefiting from increasingly capacious and lower cost solid state drive options, Seagate still sees a market for good old fashioned mechanical hard disk drives. As such, the company said it achieved a major milestone in areal density that allows it to offer up to 2TB of storage space in a slim 7mm package. This isn't the first 2TB mobile HDD, but the other models are bigger, as in physical size (9.5mm or taller). Seagate is the first to offer 2TB in a 2.5-inch, 7mm form factor, which could be attractive to OEMs looking to cram more storage capacity in ultra-thin laptops. Seagate's new drive uses a two-platter design. I'm not sure there's a huge market for mechanical drives outside of laptops, but given the size, Seagate insists that OEMs can use its 2TB HDD in "virtually any kind of mobile device." This isn't just two 1TB platters squished into a 7mm chassis. It also features "new mechanical firmware architectures, with state-of-the-art heads, media, and electronic design," Seagate says. At just 3.17 ounces, Seagate's 2TB drive is 25 percent lighter than the previous generation. Seagate didn't offer up any performance metrics, though being a mechanical drive, don't expect to be blown away. That said, Seagate is considering a hybrid model that would combine NAND flash memory with spinning platters. No word yet on price or availability. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Lenovo Expands Business Lineup with New ThinkPad E Laptops Posted: 01 Sep 2015 09:41 AM PDT Getting down to business Business users in need of cheap thrills may be interested in Lenovo's latest offerings. Chief among them is the ThinkPad E Series consisting of 14-inch and 15.6-inch laptops for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Lenovo's a little light on the fine grain details, though the world's top supplier of PCs did say that its new ThinkPad E models sport the latest generation Intel and AMD processors for up to 10 percent better raw performance and up to 34 percent superior integrated graphics performance over the previous offerings. Some of the options include discrete graphics, up to 16GB of memory, solid state storage, fingerprint security, and an Intel RealSense 3D camera (specific to the ThinkPad E560). As for non-optional features, the laptops feature three USB 3.0 ports, HDMi output, and GbE LAN connectivity. The new ThinkPad E Series will start at $449 and will be available in November. Lenovo also announced S Series all-in-one PCs and two tower desktop systems, the S200 and S500. Again, details are light at the moment, but we know the AIOs will include 19.5-inch, 21.5-inch, and 23-inch Full HD display options with optional touch support. Like the new laptops, the updated AIO and tower desktops will use the latest AMD and Intel processors. They'll also come with SSDs and discrete graphics, and will feature built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. Lenovo didn't say how much its AIO and tower desktops will cost, adding only that they'll be available in the fourth quarter in select markets. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Benchmarked: Ashes of the Singularity Posted: 01 Sep 2015 12:00 AM PDT The Politics of DX12Last week, Oxide gave press early access to their pre-beta version of Ashes of the Singularity. If you've been hiding under a rock, here's why this is important. So far, the only DX12 benchmarks anyone has been able to run have been synthetic in nature—the 3DMark API Overhead test pounds the GPU with draw calls until the GPU hits its limit, and gives a score; the earlier Star Swarm benchmark (formerly of AMD Mantle fame) was sort of in the same situation, except Star Swarm was a lot closer to being an actual game. And that game will be Ashes of the Singularity. Now, the first thing to get out of the way is that Ashes of the Singularity sports an AMD Gaming Evolved logo, meaning they're actively receiving help and promotion from AMD. This is nothing new, as we've had plenty of Nvidia The Way It's Meant To Be Played (TWIMTBP) titles over the years, including Batman: Arkham Knight (and all the other Arkham games), The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, the Borderlands series, and the Metro series, to name a few. On the AMD side, we have plenty of options as well: Tomb Raider, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Hitman: Absolution and its upcoming sequel, the recent and upcoming Deus Ex titles, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and most of the DiRT series. We list these merely to show that there are many games that are promoted by AMD or Nvidia, but usually not both; you'll also note that we're pretty evenly split on the games we're currently benchmarking for GPU reviews. But the short summary is that titles with an Nvidia logo are often better optimized—particularly near launch—for Nvidia GPUs, and likewise AMD titles are often better optimized for AMD GPUs. Capiche? This discussion of AMD backing also becomes pertinent when we get to looking at performance. Nvidia contacted the press after the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark went out to point out that anti-aliasing was running sub-optimally on the DX12 path with Nvidia GPUs, and they recommended we test with AA disabled. Developer Oxide responded with a blog post titled The Birth of a New API, saying that the DX11 and DX12 MSAA is "essentially unchanged." And here's where things get a bit sticky. Potentially, AMD has some hardware features that would enable a developer writing DX12 code to have better MSAA performance compared to DX11 code; Nvidia GPUs may or may not be able to do the same thing. (Just search for "DX12 Async Compute" if you're curious.) Getting even deeper into the fundamentals of DX11 vs. DX12 programming, under DX11 there were a lot of things that could be done in the GPU drivers to try to optimize performance. With DX12 being a low-level API, most of the driver tweaks are not possible; instead, it's up to the software developers to write optimized code to extract maximum performance from the various GPUs. In a sense, it's like giving game developers the ability to write assembly language for the GPU rather than programming in C++, though it should be noted that DX12 is still a higher-level language. Regardless, if a developer is going to extract maximum performance from a GPU, they'll need to optimize their code for that GPU—and code optimized for one GPU's architecture may not run optimally on a different architecture! In a worst-case scenario, a developer might need to have different code paths for AMD Fiji, Hawaii, Tonga, Tahiti, etc., and Nvidia Maxwell 2.0, Maxwell 1.0, Kepler, Fermi, etc., architectures. All of this is further compounded by the fact that Ashes of the Singularity is currently "pre-beta," though the official beta should be starting very soon. The beta stage is often where a lot of performance optimizations and fine tuning takes place, so looking at performance right now is, at best, a preview of what may or may not come to pass. We can argue about whether Oxide and Nvidia are being fully transparent, but that's sort of beside the point. The reality is that DX12 is supposed to be a low-level API that will allow the game developers to extract more performance from the hardware, which means better graphics and hopefully better gameplay will be possible. Or put another way, at the very least, DX12 performance should never be lower than DX11 performance; if it is, something is wrong with the code and the developer should look to fix things. The rumor is that Nvidia put a lot of effort into their DX11 drivers for Ashes, and didn't do much to help with DX12 optimizations for their hardware, but that's mostly speculation. What we do know is that DX12 with MSAA enabled does in fact tend to run slower on Nvidia GPUs than the DX11 code, and that's a clear problem. Ultimately, we opted to run all testing without MSAA enabled; when the game officially launches, we can revisit the subject. But who cares about all the political stuff going on behind the scenes?! We're still looking forward to DX12 games and we want to know as much as the next guy what DX12 can do for performance, graphics quality, etc. All the above caveats aside, how does the current pre-beta release of Ashes run on the various GPUs? That's what we attempted to find out, which entailed running the benchmark many, many times. Let me tell you, there's no better way to make someone hate a game than to have them watch the same sequence over and over again! Over three minutes per test gets to be quite lengthy, and we tested no fewer than three resolutions, three quality settings, two CPU clock speeds, four thread settings, and two graphics cards, plus looking at DX11 and DX12. (If you want the math: 3 * 3 * 2 * 4 * 2 *2 = 288.) That's 14.4 hours (minimum!) of running the same three minute sequence. Thank goodness for scripting…. [If you want to view all of the raw data, including Normal, Medium, Heavy batch FPS along with the average FPS and 97 percentile results we're showing, you can view all of our results on Drive.] In the interest of keeping the number of charts to a minimum (inasmuch as sixteen charts is a "minimum"), we're only showing the Low and High quality presets, again with AA disabled on the High preset. Medium quality, as you'd expect, ends up falling between the two and is thus not really necessary, but if anyone wants those charts as well, let us know. We've grouped the charts according to the test GPU, with differing numbers of threads, resolution, and DX11/DX12 on each GPU. At the time of testing, we were somewhat limited in terms of what GPUs we had available, so we tested with an EVGA GTX 980 Ti (factory overclocked) and the Asus Strix R9 Fury. Note that this isn't an AMD vs. Nvidia performance test, but rather a look at how each vendor scales—or doesn't scale!—with the various settings/features. You Take the High Road…Starting with the high-quality setting, we're looking at the full average FPS for the entire benchmark. Oxide actually breaks things up into Normal, Medium, and Heavy batches, as the number of draw calls for the test scenes can vary quite a bit, but if we wanted to report those figures we'd need to do another 48 charts. And as much as we like charts, that's overkill, so no thanks. Anyway, the average FPS correlates pretty well with the Medium batch results, and that makes sense: Normal has fewer calls, Heavy has more, and the overall average is close to Medium. We'll also look at the 97 Percentile FPS, which is a good indication of whether a game stutters at times.
Our test system is the same as we normally use for GPU tests, except we ran it overclocked at 4.2GHz as well as underclocked at 2.1GHz. For the multi-threaded testing, we used a command-line parameter for Ashes rather than actually disabling/enabling cores in the motherboard BIOS; unfortunately, that only seems to have partially worked, as the two-thread and four-thread results don't seem to change much. Given the preliminary nature of the testing, we'll go with what we have for now, but most likely we would see better scaling if we had physically turned off two cores and disabled Hyper-Threading rather than just telling Ashes to run with four threads. Starting with the AMD results, right away we find some interesting stuff going on. Using DX12 with a 4.2GHz processor is enough to basically max out the R9 Fury. It doesn't matter if we use two, four, six, or 12 threads: performance is nearly identical. Alternately, having six or 12 threads with a 2.1GHz processor also delivers nearly the same level of performance. Here's where DX12 is going to do AMD a ton of favors, at least in the CPU/APU arena, as it looks like four physical cores at a moderate clock (3GHz) should make the GPU the primary bottleneck (though multi-GPU configurations might still want more CPU power). Performance on the 2.1GHz processor improves by over 25 percent going from two to 12 threads (granted, no one is likely to be running a 12-thread 2.1GHz CPU). Perhaps more telling is that at 2.1GHz, DX12 is able to improve AMD's performance by 35–65 percent over DX11; even at 4.2GHz, DX12 still boasts a 15–35 percent improvement. Of course, part of the reason for the above improvements is due to the poor DX11 results. We've heard Nvidia put a lot of effort into their DX11 performance, but by contrast it looks like AMD has made virtually no effort to deliver good DX11 performance with Ashes. Threads don't matter under DX11 either, as there's little difference in performance under DX11, regardless of the number of threads, even at 2.1GHz. The 4.2GHz processor shows at most a five percent increase going from two threads to 12 threads, while the 2.1GHz processor shows at most a 10 percent improvement. The change in clock speeds does help, of course: the 4.2GHz CPU is up to 30 percent faster than the 2.1GHz CPU, though at higher resolutions the margin of victory narrows. Flipping over to the Nvidia side of things, it's a completely different story. DX12 helps performance… sometimes; other times, it's worse than DX11. This is without MSAA, which apparently further exacerbates the situation. Remember what we said earlier about software optimizations vs. driver optimizations? It looks like Nvidia's 980 Ti is currently running DX12 code tuned for AMD hardware, which in many instances is unable to match Nvidia's highly tuned DX11 driver performance. We might even go so far as to say that Nvidia set the DX11 bar really high, and Oxide failed to clear it—at least right now. Digging into the details, what's interesting is that unlike AMD, Nvidia shows clear performance scaling with more threads with the lower clocked CPU. DX11 performance improves by 20–30 percent (depending on resolution) going from two to 12 threads, and DX12 performance improves by up to 40 percent. However, 4K performance is actually lower under DX12 than under DX11. Crank up the CPU clocks to 4.2GHz and threads become less of a factor; at best we see a 10 percent increase at 1080p under DX11, but at higher resolutions the 980 Ti becomes the bottleneck. If you're wondering why Nvidia may have a bone to pick with Oxide, at 4.2GHz their DX11 mode outperforms DX12 mode across all resolutions and thread counts. Oops. Again, since DX12 is a low-level API, it's up to the software developers to optimize their code for different hardware. Oxide notes in their blog post, "Some optimizations that the drivers are doing in DX11 just aren't working in DX12 yet. Oxide believes it has identified some of the issues with MSAA and is working to implement workarounds on our code." In other words, Nvidia's optimized DX11 drivers are doing a better job at certain things right now than Oxide's DX12 code—but Oxide is working to fix that. We haven't said much about the 97 percentile results yet, but the story there is much the same. Nvidia with the 4.2GHz CPU delivers similar minimum FPS, regardless of DX11/DX12 or the number of CPU threads. At 2.1GHz, however, DX12 does make a sometimes sizable difference—the 1080p results with 12 threads are nearly 50 percent higher than the DX11 results. For AMD, DX11 minimums are horrific: well under 20fps. There's no scaling with CPU threads on DX11, but DX12 in turn delivers a great showing: the 12-thread 1080p DX12 performance is up to 2.5X higher than the DX11 performance on a 2.1GHz CPU. Having a 4.2GHz CPU helps some, but DX12 still shows nearly a doubling of minimum FPS at 1080p, a 75 percent boost at 1440p, and a still-hefty 50 percent increase at 4K. So far, we've avoided making direct comparisons between the two GPUs, as they're not in the same price bracket. However, if we take it as a given that the EVGA GTX 980 Ti is roughly 20 percent faster than Asus R9 Fury (that's what our earlier testing showed), it looks like AMD's Fury X may hold a slight performance advantage over 980 Ti in DX12 mode. But we need to balance that against how badly AMD does in DX11. The R9 Fury in DX11 mode is pretty clearly running into CPU bottlenecks, even at 4.2GHz, but these bottlenecks are far lower than on Nvidia's hardware. Ergo, AMD's DX11 drivers are not nearly as efficient as Nvidia's DX11 drivers—this is something many people have noticed over the past several generations of hardware. I'll Take the Low RoadThat takes care of performance at the High settings, but what if we drop the quality? We'll skip over most of the analysis, as the story doesn't change too much from the above—and most people owning a 980 Ti or R9 Fury aren't going to be running low-quality settings in the first place! Here's a repeat of the above charts, only now we've dropped the rendering quality. Not surprisingly, the reduction in graphics fidelity has made Ashes more CPU bottlenecked. The biggest change is that frame rates are higher, naturally, but even at low quality we still see a decent amount of scaling on AMD hardware going from DX11 to DX12. In fact, the improvement is even greater this time, with up to 90 percent improvements at 2.1GHz and 60 percent at 4.2GHz. Nvidia also shows better performance across all settings with the 2.1GHz CPU, but 4K with the 4.2GHz processor still shows a performance drop of up to 10 percent. As for 97 percentile frame rates, again we have to look at Nvidia and AMD separately. For Nvidia, there appears to be a wall at around 30fps at 2.1GHz in DX11 mode, and DX12 helps to lift that bottleneck to more than 50fps. With the 4.2GHz CPU, the wall is at 45fps, and DX12 increases that to nearly 70fps. Interestingly, AMD shows similar results under DX12: 50fps with 2.1GHz, 60fps at 4.2GHz. But that darn DX11 performance; 16fps at 2.1GHz and 23fps at 4.2GHz is horrible; there's no other way to put it. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to DustAs the first of what will likely be many DX12-enabled titles coming sometime between now and 2016, Ashes of the Singularity is at best a taste of what's to come. And that taste is… perplexing. Anyone hoping DX12 will mean the end of the GPU vendor wars is sure to be disappointed; if anything, DX12 looks to make the rivalry even more brutal. We've seen a few people hailing AMD as the decisive winner of DX12 performance (for their DX12 Async Compute support), the problem being that we're looking at an AMD-promoted title. They should offer better performance than Nvidia on a title they're promoting, especially at a pre-launch stage...except they don't, at least not by any meaningful margin. What we have is, at best, a close match in DX12 performance, with poor DX11 performance from AMD. Whether this will reflect future DX12 titles remains to be seen. Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite, and a host of other engines will more likely than not differ from Ashes. Frankly, this testing is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We ran two GPUs at a whole bunch of settings to find out how they performed, and this is in a single game. Does Fury X claim the crown from 980 Ti in this one title? We could answer that question with some additional testing, but that's sort of missing the point. Right now, we can see that DX12 definitely makes a difference in performance, giving the game developers a lot more power. But with great power comes great responsibility, and some developers may not be able to handle DX12, at least not without more time and effort. The next fight is shaping up to be Lionhead's Fable Legends, and that will perhaps be a more neutral battleground as it's neither an AMD nor an Nvidia title. In fact, it appears Microsoft (who owns Lionhead) is determined to put forth a message that DX12 is unified. Microsoft doesn't want DX12 to appear as a fractured landscape, one where AMD or Nvidia rules, a place where processor graphics gets left in the dust. In that sense, Fable should be the most likely vendor-agnostic approach to DX12 we're going to see in the near term. We're certainly looking forward to testing it, though it may be a few months. Ultimately, no matter what AMD, Microsoft, or Nvidia might say, there's another important fact to consider. DX11 (and DX10/DX9) are not going away; the big developers have the resources to do low-level programming with DX12 to improve performance. Independent developers and smaller outfits are not going to be as enamored with putting in more work on the engine if it just takes time away from making a great game. And at the end of the day, that's what really matters. Games like StarCraft II, Fallout 3, and the Mass Effect series have all received rave reviews, with nary a DX11 piece of code in sight. And until DX11 is well and truly put to rest (maybe around the time Dream Machine 2020 rolls out?), things like drivers and CPU performance are still going to be important. Let's end with some questions. What games are you most looking forward to for the coming year? And will DX12 support—or a lack thereof—affect your buying decisions? Let us know what other games you're most interested in seeing benchmarked! Follow Jarred on Twitter. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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