Graphics Technical Notes for Founders Ashes of the Singularity

Welcome to the Founder’s Edition for Ashes of the Singularity! Being part of the development cycle for a game can be a very exciting adventure, but it can also be frustrating if you are new to the process. I want to take the time to walk through some of the thoughts and state of the graphics for Ashes.

The first thing I’ll mention is that as of the Founder’s Edition, we have spent minimal time optimizing GPU performance. This is because GPU performance is typically done later in the development cycle when art assets are closer to lock-down, material shaders are done, and the rendering pipeline is effectively complete. Optimizing earlier then that often causes the shader code to become somewhat unreadable and more difficult to make changes to. However, we have done some basic performance analysis and have some general notes on what to expect.

First, Ashes does not require the most high end hardware to run on. With the right settings, I am able to run on my 2.5 year old notebook at a playable frame rate. This requires turning many of the graphics settings down.  In particular, we recommend turning of temporal AA, and also some post fx like glare and bloom, and possibly shadows. Turning shading down will also help. Currently, Ashes does not have an auto-detect mechanism to adjust the graphics to a sensible setting for the available graphics card. It defaults to relatively high settings, so do not be alarmed if it runs slow at first. Some experimentation will be required to get a set of options that works best.

Second, while we can run on some older and slower GPUS, Ashes currently will run exceptionally poorly on cards with less than 2GBs of memory. This is because the texture resources spill into main memory which is vastly slower then GPU memory.  Usually when the game runs at extremely slow fps, it is because of this reason. By release, we will have more solid memory profiles to adapt to available GPU memory, but as of now, our adaption is very minimal, and done only via a heavy weight MIP reduction. It may be the case that even on a 2gb card that the larger map sizes will run poorly on cards with less video memory. These are known issues which will get addressed in later builds.

Third, Nitrous is a next gen engine and will run best on next-gen APIS. Thus, it will likely be the case that for big battles on slower CPUs,some of the graphics settings will need to turned off, such as temporal AA and shadowing for D3D11. This is because D3D11 has more overhead and limits our ability to spread across cores.  For founders, though we showcased Ashes running on D3D12 at the AMD Fury launch event, we are not shipping the D3D12 version yet to consumers. This is because Windows 10 is not yet released nor are the D3D12 public drivers in a state where we find it useful to distribute to consumers. In laymen terms, until Windows 10 is out of beta, we’re not going to publically release the D3D12 copy. Rest assured that it’s coming in a few months, and it’s awesome.

Fourth, users may experience more driver bugs then is typical for a game release. Ashes uses many high end graphics features, some of which have less test coverage then average. Normally, when a title like Ashes ships, it is run through an extensive QA lab by AMD and Nvidia, which allows any fixes in the drivers to be made and shipped out to consumers with the product launch. Because this is an alpha of the engine, this QA process has not yet happened. Founders members will get to experience all the joy of development with all the glitches and problems us developers get to see on a daily basis!  While we can collect compatibility issues, likely there will not be much we can do in the near term. I can say that we run extensively on the latest generation AMD and Nvidia GPUs, so while we are fairly confident newer GPUS will work, there are over 300 video card varients which are D3D11 compliant, far too many to test in the near term.

Finally, everyone at Oxide would like to thank everyone for participating in the founders program. Ashes has some exciting new technology, and we’re eager to get it into the hands of gamers!