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Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation Update Brings Improved Performance to Ryzen

Raevenlord

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Some outlets are reporting that Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity is about to receive the much-referred-to patch that allows for improved performance on AMD's Ryzen line of processors. If you remember, rivers of ink flowed regarding AMD's Ryzen performance in gaming, with its monstrous, high-performance 8-core, 16-threaded design sometimes delivering performance below expectations. At the time, AMD clarified how Ryzen is a distinctive CPU architecture, similar yet fundamentally different from Intel's x86 implementation, promising upcoming patches from game developers that would allow Ryzen's architecture to truly deliver.

After Creative Assembly and Oxide Games vouched to improve Ryzen support, Oxide seems to be the first developer with a patch available (from version 25624 to 26118) that improves performance by up to 30%. Reportedly, it took the developers around 400 work-hours to improve the game code in respect to its execution on AMD hardware.





The update leads to AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X effectively edging out Intel's 7700K in all scenarios, whose better overall gaming performance is the prevailing argument towards preferring the Intel solution. Even so, it would seem that Intel's 6900K still edges out the Ryzen 7 1800X on the Extreme, 1080p preset. But its 7 FPS lead over the 1800X when paired with 2400 MHz DDR4 memory does come with a cost of more than double the 1800X's.

Performance improvements are greater when the Ryzen processors are paired with higher-performing memory (a nod to the way the CCX's Infinity Fabric inter-CCX communication is dependent on memory throughput for increased performance). It would seem that this update improves Ashes' handling of work threads on the Ryzen CPUs, limiting the amount of workload that hops between CCXs - which incurs in a heavy latency penalty for Ryzen processors. Thus, the load on Infinity Fabric would be alleviated, allowing for its increased throughput to carry only game-critical data between both CCXs, whilst not having to also deal with performance-dropping, inter-CCX tread-hopping.

This is an interesting development, which some probably didn't think would actually happen - bold "future performance improvement" claims have been shouted on their way down from rooftops, after all. And while a single developer (out of two who committed to improving performance) doesn't represent an entire industry, it does give AMD credence in its promises of latent performance on their Ryzen CPUs. Best of all: this happens with no performance penalty for AMD's arch-rival Intel processors. We have to wait and see, but fingers crossed for Creative Assembly's changes (when they come, if they come) to join Oxide Games' own improvements opening up the industry to some relevant, platform-specific improvements (and at the same time, agnostic, as in, with no penalties for Intel).

AMD's partnership with Bethesda is looking more and more interesting by the day.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
Very nice improvement from just software.

Lets hope other games where performance was no at its expected level get patched as well :)
 
This is really great, now I'm still waiting for the update that actually makes it worthwhile to start a game of Ashes in the first place.
 
Dota 2 has also received a patch showing significant improvements.

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It's a little depressing that the only reason people have heard of/buy your game is because of benchmarking. I literally do not know anyone that owns this game aside from myself and benchmarkers, and most of us have never actually played it.
 
This is one of the few times I've actually seen the hype come true...

over the past 4 weeks I've gained ~100 pts in Cinebench (from 1740 to 1850 over a bios update), the initial windows Creator's build, and 50 Mhz on the core (now stable at 4050 instead of 4000) -- and now this (granted I don't play ashes)...

Throw in the few extra FPS from the DX12 NVidia driver, and rig is feeling pretty zippy these days.
 
Quad channel memory typically makes very little difference in performance over dual (in gaming).
 
Quad channel memory typically makes very little difference in performance over dual (in gaming).
But at extreme settings it does as far as what I have seen.
 
It's a nice jump from a patch alone, but I own AOTS and it's always seemed more like an AMD gfx demo than a game. I'm also a bit skeptical of other devs spending 400+ hours to optimize their games for Ryzen. The AOTS devs are very connected to AMD so they are definitely a special case. I'm far more interested in the performance in more mainstream games like BF1, Rise of Tomb Raider, ME: A, etc. that aren't significantly subsidized by 1 vendor to get special treatment and give misleading results. Granted most games get that to a smaller degree with "Best played on...", but not usually to the degree of AOTS.
 
It's a little depressing that the only reason people have heard of/buy your game is because of benchmarking. I literally do not know anyone that owns this game aside from myself and benchmarkers, and most of us have never actually played it.

I've played it a bunch...could care less about the benchmarking part. Has quite a bit to do in SP, I don't MP much, AI is impressive (for me) too!

I should add it loads my system more than any other game, but is the best looking RTS I've ever seen. It's only gotten better with each patch, and I think if folks are running off of older assumptions about the game they should take a second look. I've enjoyed AotS since 1.3, and AotSE is pretty damn good and continually improving. Far more game than benchmark to me, and I'm not gaming on AMD.

:toast:
 
It's a nice jump from a patch alone, but I own AOTS and it's always seemed more like an AMD gfx demo than a game. I'm also a bit skeptical of other devs spending 400+ hours to optimize their games for Ryzen. The AOTS devs are very connected to AMD so they are definitely a special case. I'm far more interested in the performance in more mainstream games like BF1, Rise of Tomb Raider, ME: A, etc. that aren't significantly subsidized by 1 vendor to get special treatment and give misleading results. Granted most games get that to a smaller degree with "Best played on...", but not usually to the degree of AOTS.

Aaa games are optimized for... Jaguar cores we can find on ps4.
 
So, Ryzen CPU isn't so bad for gaming after all. Software devs, do your homework now. Or else you just sabotage AMD imho.
 
So, Ryzen CPU isn't so bad for gaming after all. Software devs, do your homework now. Or else you just sabotage AMD imho.

No one ever said ryzen is bad for gaming. Is just that Intel similar and lower priced are better.
 
Cant say I have heard that...

Links please... :)

I cannot share a link to what I have seen as it's a computer at my friends place. I only have duel channel 1800x now. If you have friends. Try playing dirt game and you will see quad channel getting nice boost compared to duel channel.

If the developer has developed the game to take advantage of quad channel, then it will. Same applies for ganged mode and un-ganged.. I have seen games taking advantage of the ganged 128 and some games have a negitive impact
 
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Sweet. This is very good news indeed. I hope that devs continue to support AMD's architectural differences. Ryzen just might be a gaming beast yet!
 
I'm also a bit skeptical of other devs spending 400+ hours to optimize their games for Ryzen.

400 hours is basically nothing in terms of game development time. You have to analyze the problem, optimize code, build, test for regressions/improvements on multiple systems and repeat. Five devs will burn that time in 2 weeks. If it really takes such a small amount of time to squeeze a performance bonus out of Ryzen, every engine developer will do this for sure. This will then translate into all future games and/or even some current games.
 
400 hours is basically nothing in terms of game development time. You have to analyze the problem, optimize code, build, test for regressions/improvements on multiple systems and repeat. Five devs will burn that time in 2 weeks. If it really takes such a small amount of time to squeeze a performance bonus out of Ryzen, every engine developer will do this for sure. This will then translate into all future games and/or even some current games.

Agreed, assuming other engines are set up to also be equally easy to tweak, i.e. the scheduling isn't tightly integrated into the core operation of it (which it really shouldn't be). With the testing etc. the 400 hours will be distributed over even more people.
 
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