Looking Ahead
So besides getting a chance to look at an early, gorgeous benchmark for Fable Legends, what have we learned today about DX12 and performance?
Honestly, not as much as I had hoped. It's great to be able to see how the current crop of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards stack up to each other in a future game, regardless of the API that it uses. Fable Legends looks to be a fantastic free to play title with impressive visuals and a cross-play capability for Xbox One and PC gamers. It will likely be a successful release and based on the heavy workload this benchmark indicates the game will place on the GPU, I could easily see it finding a spot in our future test suite.
Compared to the results from Ashes of the Singularity, our scores and comparisons here are missing the ability to see how moving from DX11 to DX12 affects performance for each GPU vendor. Fable Legends will only run on DX12 (not just this benchmark, but the game when it ships) and thus we have no "before and after" window into the real advantages that DirectX 12 can provide. UPDATE: The game will be able to run in a fall-back DX11 mode at shipping, but will only be enabled when the game detects a GPU unable to run DX12.
Clearly there is a back and forth between AMD and NVIDIA in these results – NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti is faster than the Fury X and the GTX 950 is faster than the R7 370. But the R9 390X takes home a performance lead over the GTX 980 and the R9 380 is faster than the GTX 960. None of the margins are Earth shattering though.
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- GeForce GTX 980 Ti – $649
- Radeon R9 Fury X – $649 (hard to find!)
- GeForce GTX 980 – $499
- Radeon R9 390X – $399
- GeForce GTX 960 – $199
- Radeon R9 380 – $199
- GeForce GTX 950 – $159
- Radeon R7 370 – $149
I am eager to get my hands on the closed beta (on-going now) to see how performance in Fable Legends changes when you introduce characters, spells, effects and AI. It's possible that we might see a complete reversal of the results or they might stay unchanged – hopefully we'll get the chance to evaluate that soon.
Do the results in today's test change any opinions I have on graphics card selections for buyers looking to make changes in the near term? Not to any great degree, but I will say the Radeon R9 390X continues to look better and better (especially with the price advantage) when compared to the GeForce GTX 980. Unfortunately for AMD though, the Fury X is still slower than the GeForce GTX 980 Ti keeping the flagship performance title with NVIDIA.
My thanks goes out to Microsoft and Lionhead Studio for access to the benchmark for answer the dozens of questions I put forward to them during this testing process!
I see this game being more of
I see this game being more of a PR thing for Microsoft and DX12 with just a few token attempts at using DX12 features that are largely inconsequential. In essence it’s just another UE4 game, and if Lionhead has done any significant optimization effort, it’s gone to the Xbox One version. The lack of DX11 option should be enough to tell that there’s probably no major benefits since the PC port is not bottlenecked by draw calls or utilizing things like asynchronous shaders. According to UE4 documentation AS support was added by Lionhead Studios to he Xbox version, with no support for PC.
Still, it’s a pretty looking game and probably representative of a lot of UE4 titles in the near future. A lot of games like these weren’t really being bottlenecked by DX11 in the first place. I’m guessing most of the early DX12 titles will have this sort of minor tweaks and the devs are just testing things out, and it’ll take a year or two before we start seeing engines make real use out of DX12, especially on PC.
Luddites!
Luddites!
Yep 100% agree
Yep 100% agree
Async Compute is NOT utilized
Async Compute is NOT utilized in current UE4 engine, except for the Xbox One.
Ref: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Rendering/ShaderDevelopment/AsyncCompute/index.html
This makes the r9-290x look
This makes the r9-290x look like a monster value if more dx12 title turn out this way.
Less then Half the price of a GTX 980, and faster at 1080p and 4K
(and better frame times)
Other sites did test the GTX 970, and its not looking good kids…
Many people really overpaid for much less capable HW then hawaii.
(but at least its rocks in dx11 titles)
Ryan, I suppose the benchmark
Ryan, I suppose the benchmark does not support SLI or crossfire or you would have tested them?
LOVE the interactive graphs
LOVE the interactive graphs
This is definitely a better
This is definitely a better benchmark to judge future performance of DX12. Fable Legends uses Unreal Engine 4. Hundreds of last gen games were made with Unreal Engine 3, from Bioshock Infinite, Gears of War, Hawken, Borderlands, XCOM, etc. And probably hundreds more games will be made with Unreal Engine 4, which has DX12 support built in. The Ashes of the Singularity game engine isn’t likely to be widely used beyond a few games, so this seems to be a much better indicator of future DX12 performance in most games. Also Unreal Engine 4 is very indie friendly, so this should apply to more than just AAA games.
UE4 is FREE!
UE4 is FREE!
Free!*
*You pay a 5 percent
Free!*
*You pay a 5 percent royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter.
“It turns out that the game
“It turns out that the game will have a fall-back DX11 mode that will be enabled if the game detects a GPU incapable of running DX12.”
Give me DX11 VS DX12, now!!!
Any update on whether the
Any update on whether the catalyst driver 15.9.1 actually improve the performance of the AMD cards??