Ashes, Battlefield 1 & Civilization VI
Ashes of the Singularity (DX12)
In the past, we tested Ashes of the Singularity using the game’s Extreme preset. This time around we bumped up to Crazy, given the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti’s forgone position in the performance hierarchy.
It comes as no surprise that the 1080 Ti performs a lot like Nvidia’s Titan X (Pascal). True to Jen-Hsun’s word, the new flagship is even a little faster at 2560x1440.
AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X notably beats the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and 1070 in our average frame rate measurements. Paging through the charts, though, you’ll notice its frame times spiking more often than the other cards. The implication of this is reflected in our unevenness metric, where almost 80% of the run is perfectly smooth, but that last 5% or so starts breaking down into less consistent frame delivery.
The same finishing order carries over to 4K, where Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti nearly averages 60 FPS and doesn’t drop below 40 FPS.
As before, the Radeon R9 Fury X lands in the middle of our field. While it still demonstrates worrisome frame time spikes, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti seems more prone to stutter according to our unevenness index.
Then again, given the minimum frame rates achieved by the GeForce GTX 1080 and lower, you’d either want to dial quality back in Ashes or upgrade to a faster card for 4K.
Battlefield 1 (DX12)
Our Battlefield 1 benchmark comes from the Avanti Savoia! story, where we run an 80-second sequence at the beginning of O La Vittoria. Naturally, all of our test subjects utilize DirectX 12 and the Ultra quality preset.
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti carves out an almost-24% advantage over the GeForce GTX 1080 at 2560x1440, pushing it over 100 FPS on average. That’s a 68% speed-up over last generation’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti. AMD’s fastest single-GPU solution is desperately looking for relief from the Radeon RX Vega, expected next quarter.
4K is more interesting, if only because the higher resolution puts more of a strain on these high-end graphics cards.
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti maintains a small average frame rate advantage over the Titan X (Pascal), and its lead over GeForce GTX 1080 grows to almost 29%. That’s significant insofar as the 1080 Ti keeps its nose above 50 FPS through our test sequence, while 1080 drops closer to 40 FPS.
Our unevenness index illustrates how the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and Titan X deliver mostly-smooth experiences, while the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X spend about half of the run in an “average” playability range.
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Civilization VI (DX12)
Let’s be real: Civilization VI isn’t great as a graphics benchmark. It’s largely CPU-bound, even on our Core i7-7700K. But we know this is a popular title, so we crank all of the Advanced detail settings up as high as they’ll go and apply 8x MSAA to increase the graphics workload as much as possible.
Nevertheless, at 2560x1440, all of the GeForce cards land within a few FPS of each other. The 1080 Ti even appears at the bottom of this pile. Jumping up to 4K should give the GP102-based boards an opportunity to stretch their legs a little more…
The finishing order straightens out a bit, but the fact that four cards all bunch up around 60 FPS (yes, with v-sync and the game’s internal frame-limiter disabled) tells us more graphics horsepower won’t help. Expect Civ VI to show up more often in our CPU reviews and perhaps mainstream graphics stories. It’s just not a good indicator of high-end GPU performance.
