On pure average frame rate numbers, we saw NVIDIA’s GTX 980 Ti by just under 10% in all configurations except for the 1280x720 settings which gave the Fury X a substantial (10%+ on i5 and i3) lead. Looking at CPU scaling, this showed that scaling only ever really occurred at the 1280x720 settings anyway, with both AMD and NVIDIA showing a 20-25% gain moving from a Core i3 to a Core i7. Some of the older cards showed a smaller 7% improvement over the same test.
Looking through the frame rate profile data, specifically looking for minimum benchmark percentile numbers, we saw an interesting correlation with using a Core i7 (six core, HT) platform and the frame rates on complex frames being beaten by the Core i5 and even the Core i3 setups, despite the fact that during the easier frames to compute the Core i7 performed better. In our graphs, it gave a tilted axis akin to a seesaw:
When comparing the separate compute profile time data provided by the benchmark, it showed that the Core i7 was taking longer for a few of the lighting techniques, perhaps relating to cache or scheduling issues either at the CPU end or the GPU end which was alleviated with fewer cores in the mix. This may come down to a memory controller not being bombarded with higher priority requests causing a shuffle in the data request queue.
When we do a direct comparison for AMD’s Fury X and NVIDIA’s GTX 980 Ti in the render sub-category results for 4K using a Core i7, both AMD and NVIDIA have their strong points in this benchmark. NVIDIA favors illumination, compute shader work and GBuffer rendering where AMD favors post processing, transparency and dynamic lighting.
DirectX 12 is coming in with new effects to make games look better with new features to allow developers to extract performance out of our hardware. Fable Legends uses EPIC’s Unreal Engine 4 with added effects and represents a multi-year effort to develop the engine around DX12's feature set and ultimately improve performance over DX11. With this benchmark we have begun to peek a little in to what actual graphics performance in games might be like, and if DX12 benefits users on low powered CPUs or high-end GPUs more. That being said, there is a good chance that the performance we’ve seen today will change by release due to driver updates and/or optimizing the game code. Nevertheless, at this point it does appear that a reasonably strong card such as the 290X or GTX 970 are needed to get a smooth 1080p experience (at Ultra settings) with this demo.
