NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Review: A Look At 1440p, 4K & Ultrawide Gaming

DirectX 12 Testing

Considering the fact that we’ve been hearing about DirectX 12 for what feels like forever, it’s a little surprising that the number of DX12 titles out there remain few. Heck, one such game was Fable Legends, and that was shut down last month. We’re definitely in the middle of a waiting game for more DX12 titles to get here, but thankfully, those that do exist now prove great for testing.

Of all the DirectX 12 games out there, Ashes of the Singularity takes the best advantage of its low-level API capabilities. As a strategy game, there could be an enormous number of AI bots on the screen at once, and in those cases, both the CPU and GPU can be used for computation.

I should be clear about one thing: low-level graphics APIs are designed to benefit low-end hardware better, but when we’re dealing with GPUs that cost hundreds of dollars, that rules that kind of test useless. For that reason, I’ve chosen to benchmark these three games as normal; the results might not be specific to low-level DX12 enhancements, but they’re still fair for comparisons against other high-end graphics cards.

After performance testing was originally completed for Ashes, its developer released a patch that overhauled the UI and added a new graphics setting. That caused me to have to retest everything, as it wouldn’t have been possible (that I know of) to choose settings in the new client that would perfectly match the old one. Nonetheless, these results are as fresh as they come.

Yet again, we’re seeing the trend we’ve exhibited up to this point: the GTX 1070 bests the TITAN X. Surprised?

How about Rise Of The Tomb Raider?

For some reason, the GTX 1080 managed to achieve a much greater lead in RotTR in the DirectX 12 test. It of course had a bit of a gain in the DX11 test, but the delta is even greater here – at all three resolutions. The rest of the GPU performance trickles down just as we’d expect.

Aha! We couldn’t wrap up testing without an oddball result, could we? Well, in this case, it’s not an “oddball” result per se, but it does stand out. In this particular test, AMD’s card slips right into the middle, rather than share one of the two bottom spots with the GTX 980. Could it be because the game is a Gaming Evolved title or AMD’s DX12 work just happens to shine through here? I’m not sure, but it’s nice to see a little shake-up once in a while!