Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (2016, DX12)
Technically, Ashes of the Singularity was released early in 2016, allowing us to benchmark it in DirectX 12 mode for our Radeon RX 480 and GeForce GTX 1060 6GB reviews. The Escalation update followed in November of 2016, and that’s the version we test today.
AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture is better-utilized in DirectX 12-based games than it was under DirectX 11. As a result, GCN is widely considered superior to Pascal in the newest games.
But whereas our benchmark results using AMD's 16.6.2 driver are consistent from 2016 to 2018, the Radeon’s average frame rate under Adrenalin Edition 18.7.1 is surprisingly lower.
As we saw in Battlefield 1, the 18.7.1 driver appears to sacrifice some peak performance in favor of less frame time variance. The result is a better 99th percentile frame rate and minimal drop-off in the slowest 1% of frames.
GeForce GTX 1060 6GB began its life trailing the Radeon in Ashes of the Singularity. Subsequent game patches and driver updates improved the mainstream card’s position though, and now it’s faster than the RX 480. Even more impressive, Nvidia bettered the 1060 6GB’s 99th percentile frame rate without compromising peak performance.
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