Ashes of the Singularity PC Performance Review

1080p Testing with the GTX 960 and R9 380

 

When testing this game we decided to not use the game’s built-in benchmarking tool, instead opting for a 60-second section of gameplay from the game’s campaign which includes sections where we look at an empty base where we build a few units all and move towards a large battle scene in the distance. 

The built-in benchmarking tool proved to provide very similar in-game performance when looking at comparable scenes. 

When looking at our R9 380 and GTX 960 at low settings we see that both GPUs have very similar performance when using the DirectX 11 API, though when moving to DirectX 12 we that AMD’s R9 380 has a large advantage.   

In almost all cases in this Ashes of the Singularity, AMD GPUs have better performance when running DirectX 12 and Nvidia have better performance when using DirectX 11.   

 

  

 

Moving up to standard settings we see that AMD gains a huge performance advantage when running with DirectX 12, offering a much higher average framerate, though please note that the minimum framerates that we have in large battle scenes remain similar for both GPUs. 

AMD’s R9 380 gains a lot of extra performance from DirectX 12 here, gaining 6FPS on both the minimum and average framerates at Standard settings, making the DirectX 12 API the clear way to play for AMD users. 

 

 

 

Moving from Standard to High settings gives us a minor performance decrease for AMD though it does give us a significant performance loss for Nvidia’s minimum framerate. When using the DirectX 11 API both the GTX 960 and the R9 380 deliver 

When using the DirectX 11 API at high settings the GTX 960 and the R9 380 deliver almost identical performance, but with DirectX 12 the R9 380 gains a significant performance lead.  

 

  

 

Moving to extreme settings we see similar trends to the lower settings, with AMD’s R9 380 gaining a lot of extra performance when using the DirectX 12 API, with Nvidia’s GTX 960 actually losing performance when moving to the new API.

Looking at these numbers it really shows how much Oxide Games worked to make good use of Asynchronous Compute with the new DirectX 12 API, giving AMD a significant lead in DirectX 12.