HiGame

As DirectX 12 and Windows 10 roll out across the PC ecosystem, the number of titles that support Microsoft’s new API is steadily growing. Last month, we previewed Ashes of the Singularity and its DirectX 12 performance; today we’re examining Microsoft’s Fable Legends. This upcoming title is expected to debut on both Windows PCs and the Xbox One and is built with Unreal Engine 4.

Like Ashes, Fable Legends is still very much a work-in-progress. Unlike Ashes of the Singularity, which can currently be bought and played, Microsoft chose to distribute a standalone benchmark for its first DirectX 12 title. The test has little in the way of configurable options and performs a series of flybys through complex environments. Each flyby highlights a different aspect of the game, including its day/night cycle, foliage and building rendering, and one impressively ugly troll. If Ashes of the Singularity gave us a peek at how DX12 would handle several dozen units and intense particle effects, Fable Legends looks more like a conventional first-person RPG or FPS.



There are other facets to Fable Legends that make this a particularly interesting match-up, even if it’s still very early in the DX12 development cycle. Unlike Ashes of the Singularity, which is distributed through Oxide, this is a test distributed directly by Microsoft. It uses the Unreal 4 engine — and Nvidia and Epic, Unreal’s developer, have a long history of close collaboration. Last year, Nvidia announced GameWorks support for UE4, and the UE3 engine was an early supporter of PhysX on both Ageia PPUs and later, Nvidia GeForce cards.

Test setup

We tested the GTX 980 Ti and Radeon Fury X in Windows 10 using the latest version of the operating system. Our testbed was an Asus X99-Deluxe motherboard with a Core i7-5960X, 16GB of DDR4-2667 memory. We tested an AMD-provided beta driver for the Fury X and with Nvidia’s latest WHQL-approved driver, 355.98. NVidia hasn’t released a beta Windows 10 driver since last April, and the company didn’t contact us to offer a specific driver for the Fable Legends debut.



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