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AMD responds to the controversy surrounding its Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks between 2XRX480 & GTX1080

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A couple of days ago, AMD officially revealed the Radeon RX480. During its Computex livestream, AMD showcased a RX480 Crossfire system surpassing NVIDIA’s high-end GPU, the NVIDIA GTX1080. Now a lot of gamers accused AMD for using different settings in order to favour its cards, and the big red team has responded to those accusations.

As AMD’s Technical Marketing Lead, Robert Hallock, claimed, NVIDIA’s GPUs do not render properly Ashes of the Singularity, something that explains the visual differences between the images that were shared two days ago.

“Ashes uses procedural generation based on a randomized seed at launch. The benchmark does look slightly different every time it is run. But that, many have noted, does not fully explain the quality difference people noticed.

At present the GTX 1080 is incorrectly executing the terrain shaders responsible for populating the environment with the appropriate amount of snow. The GTX 1080 is doing less work to render AOTS than it otherwise would if the shader were being run properly. Snow is somewhat flat and boring in color compared to shiny rocks, which gives the illusion that less is being rendered, but this is an incorrect interpretation of how the terrain shaders are functioning in this title.

The content being rendered by the RX 480–the one with greater snow coverage in the side-by-side (the left in these images)–is the correct execution of the terrain shaders.

So, even with fudgy image quality on the GTX 1080 that could improve their performance a few percent, dual RX 480 still came out ahead.”

Robert also claimed that AMD ran this test 10x prior to going on-stage in order to confirm the performance delta was accurate.

Regarding the PC system that was used and the benchmark numbers, Robert had this to say:

System specs:

  • CPU: i7 5930K
  • RAM: 32GB DDR4-2400Mhz
  • Motherboard: Asrock X99M Killer
  • GPU config 1: 2x Radeon RX 480 @ PCIE 3.0 x16 for each GPU
  • GPU config 2: Founders Edition GTX 1080
  • OS: Win 10 64bit
  • AMD Driver: 16.30-160525n-230356E
  • NV Driver: 368.19

In Game Settings for both configs: Crazy Settings | 1080P | 8x MSAA | VSYNC OFF

Ashes Game Version: v1.12.19928

Benchmark results:

2x Radeon RX 480 – 62.5 fps | Single Batch GPU Util: 51% | Med Batch GPU Util: 71.9 | Heavy Batch GPU Util: 92.3%
GTX 1080 – 58.7 fps | Single Batch GPU Util: 98.7%| Med Batch GPU Util: 97.9% | Heavy Batch GPU Util: 98.7%