In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our recently updated benchmark suite that tests 10 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). I also slipped in a few variations on the same games for comparisons like DX11 to DX12, OpenGL to Vulkan, and a couple of games are just tested at their highest setting and lower but still high detail options to show the performance difference when things are turned down slightly. In total, each video card is tested 41 times and that makes for a huge mess of graphs when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start off with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read the result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.

So each of the two RX 570’s were good at 1080p in my original testing so the cards paired up performing well at 1080p wasn’t a big surprise. Comparing the playability graphs between the Asus RX 570 and the two 570’s in crossfire, however, don’t show any big jumps in performance, well I should say the performance improvements didn’t translate to putting out tests up into new FPS ranges. The single card had 2 120+, 6 60+, and 5 30+ where in Crossfire only one game jumped from the 30+ range to above 60 FPS. At 1440p things were interesting as well. We went from 2 60+ 10 30+ and 1 under 30 to 1 120+, 5 60+, 5 30+, and 3 under 30. In other words, some games jumped in performance at 1440p but there were also more games than dropped down into the unplayable range. 4K only saw one moving up into the 60 plus range as well. So overall there were improvements but the games that didn’t improve or actually went down hurt the overall averages.

Those graphs weren’t all that helpful but we do have the actual game graphs so let's check those out. First off I took a look to see what games even had an improvement with Crossfire. Deus Ex, DOOM, Ashes of the Singularity, and Thief all had no improvement. Hitman did in DX11 but none in DX12. Then there was Ghost Recon: Wildlands, the results here were a little weirder. At 1080p there was almost no gain when running the Ultra detail setting and at lower resolutions, the performance was actually much lower than a single card. High detail settings, on the other hand, performed well. So basically I can say 8 out of the 14 tests ran didn’t support crossfire.

So what about the games that do have support? Well, the 570’s in Crossfire came in just above the GTX 1070 in most cases. This typically wasn’t double the performance of the single RX 570, but a decent performance jump. The RX 580’s in Crossfire were without a doubt more efficient though.