Ashes of the Singularity, BattleField 1, Doom & GTA V
Ashes of the Singularity
After a driver update, the Radeon RX 470 and 460 are notably faster than they were in our RX 460 review. Of course, the 470’s advantage is exaggerated given Asus’ aggressive overclock compared to our old Sapphire board. But even in the face of a speed-up, the RX 460 succumbs to both 1050s. That’s bad news for AMD, since AotS is a showcase of what its GCN architecture can do fully utilized.
At least in this first benchmark, the GTX 1050’s victory over EVGA’s tuned GeForce GTX 950 is significant. Not only is the 1050 faster, but it’s also less expensive and devoid of the eight-pin power connector on EVGA’s flagship previous-gen model.
We’ll also point out that Nvidia may have a tough time convincing gamers to pay almost 30% more money for 128 extra CUDA cores and 4 GB of memory when the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti’s advantage ducks in under 10%.
Battlefield 1
The story in Battlefield 1 looks a lot like Ashes: mainly, the RX 470 enjoys a nice big lead, GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti beat AMD’s Radeon RX 460, and the 1050 Ti fails to distinguish itself.
We’re still running through BF1 to identify a better sequence than the opening of Through Mud and Blood. For now, though, that’s what we have to work with. You can clearly identify the first third of our test, where the tank drives itself and we keep its turret pointing straight ahead, a middle section where the tank stops, and a more intense “assault” passage where the on-screen action induces particularly large frame time spikes on the GeForce cards. AMD’s cards appear largely immune, though they encounter smaller peaks through more of our run.
Doom
An almost-14% advantage is GeForce GTX 1050 Ti’s largest over the 1050 thus far. But a bigger win in Doom is dulled by the Radeon RX 460 wedging itself between Nvidia’s new models.
Interestingly, it looks like the frame time issues we were seeing from AMD and Nvidia worked themselves out over the past three months. All four of the boards we retested using new drivers post much lower frame time variance through our benchmark.
GTA V
Switching over from APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan to DirectX 11 has a definite impact on our results. AMD’s Radeon RX 470 continues topping the chart, but its lead over GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is under 11%. In turn, the 1050 Ti is just 10% faster than GeForce GTX 1050. The value proposition associated with each step up isn’t very compelling when you consider what those cards cost.
We mentioned that GeForce GTX 1050’s ability to hold off the Radeon RX 460 in Ashes and BF1 was significant—those DX12 titles facilitate better utilization of AMD’s architecture. DirectX 11 isn’t as friendly to the Radeons, and as such the Radeon RX 460 appears near the bottom of our GTA V chart. Though new drivers help a little bit, even a vanilla GTX 1050 leads by almost 45%.
In absolute terms, the GeForce GTX 1050s experience lower frame times through our benchmark sequence. However, they do encounter greater variance through the first 10 or 15 seconds of this test. None of that was perceptible as decreased smoothness on-screen, but it’s still interesting to see both cards demonstrating the same behavior.
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