New hardware can't debut without someone joking about whether or not it can run Crysis. Pretty much any modern system can, of course, but Crytek's pretty, first-person shooter has been enshrined in the public consciousness as a benchmark for how well given hardware performs. We at Tom's Hardware often ask a different question: How many frames per second can we squeeze out of Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with this gear? It seems like we aren't the only ones who wonder, because the game's leaderboards may have given us a peek at Nvidia's new GPUs.
Nvidia announced its new Turing architecture on August 13 alongside the first three GPUs--the Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000--to rely on it. Rumors suggest we'll get some more news from the company on August 20 with the announcement of the next-gen RTX 2080 platform (it appears the debate between whether the platform will be called the 1180 or the 2080 has finally been settled). There aren't many firm details about that announcement, but chances are good that impatient gamers will soon be able to cram a shiny new graphics card into their PC.
Which brings us back to Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. We've long used the game to benchmark new graphics cards and processors--it offers a variety of quality settings, relies on both the GPU and CPU and is a generally accepted measure of how well a system handles real-time strategy games. Now someone with the handle "nvgtltest007" has used the game on Crazy settings at 4K resolution to benchmark the "Nvidia Graphics Device" paired with an Intel Core i7-5960X clocked at 3GHz (and yes, we suspect that gobbledygook of a username is supposed to refer to secret testing of Nvidia cards).
The "Nvidia Graphics Device" appeared to score well enough. It managed to squeeze out 75.1, 60.6 and 57.4 frames per second in the game's normal, medium and heavy batch tests, respectively. The recorded CPU frame rates were 138.6, 118.4 and 91.9, respectively. That averages out to a frame rate of 63.5 and CPU frame rate of 113 on Crazy settings. For reference, we've gotten between 40 and 59.5 frames per second out of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB with Crazy settings at a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution. Therefore, this mysterious Nvidia device bottoms out near the top of what the GTX 1080 Ti can achieve.
Those numbers should be taken with a pound of salt, however, because we didn't run the tests on the "Nvidia Graphics Device" ourselves. We don't know all the differences between the setups and methodologies we use and what "nvgtltest007" uses. But if the benchmark is at least close to accurate, there's another reason to be excited for whatever Nvidia plans to announce sometime soon. We're looking forward to getting this mystery device into our own test systems so we can benchmark it ourselves. And, you know, finally play some Crysis.
