DirectX 12 Explicit Multi-GPU Performance Review with Ashes of the Singularity

1440p Testing with the Nvidia GTX 980Ti + AMD R9 Fury X

 

Moving onto 1440p we can see at the low settings of the game our Ultra high end Explicit Multi-GPU setup is able to easily hit the CPU performance limits of the benchmark that we found when running the system at 1080p, which is not a bad feat when considering that this is a highly overclocked Intel i7 Skylake based CPU at a resolution of 1440p. 

 

 

Moving onto high settings we can see that we have very good scaling here, with the Explicit Multi GPU setups in both configurations being able to almost achieve an average framerate of 100FPS, which is fantastic given the fact that this is a large scale RTS with so much action on the screen. 

 

  

 

Moving to the games Crazy Presets we see the first odd results from out testing, with the Explicit Multi-GPU configuration where the AMD GPU is installed first and running the display actually have negative scaling when used with the GTX 980Ti. 

Looking at data from GPU-Z and other GPU monitoring utilities we were able to find that the R9 Fury X was running in a memory constrained state in this configuration, where the game needed the lead GPU to have more than 4GB or VRAM, forcing the benchmark to run slowly. 

Using the GPUs in the opposite configuration where the GTX 980Ti was installed first and running the display the game was able to run with the R9 Fury X without any issues and provided almost perfect scaling when compared to the standard GTX 980Ti setup. 

It seems that the lead GPU in a DirectX 12 Explicit Multi GPU setup uses more VRAM in this configuration, meaning that GPUs that with a frame buffer of 6GB or below may run into issues in VRAM intensive games like this one.