AMD Radeon RX 460 review: An affordable graphics card with bleeding-edge tech

Test 6: Ashes of the Singularity

Ashes of the Singularity, running on Oxide’s custom Nitrous engine, was an early standard-bearer for DirectX 12, and many months later it’s still the premier game for seeing what next-gen graphics technologies have to offer. (It’s a fun real-time strategy game, too!) The performance gains it offers with DX12 over DX11 are eye-opening—especially when running on Radeon cards.

Unfortunately, those stunning performance gains aren’t seen with any of these cards. While the RX 460 gains a roughly 10-percent boost in theory, that only slightly stretches the frame rate in reality. Once again, DX12 does nothing for these cards’ modest graphical capabilities and limited memory capacities. (DX12 adores having more than 2GB of RAM to play with.)

Once again, the RX 460’s results fall in between the two Nvidia cards. None of them deliver great frame rates, to be honest, but the RX 460’s 32 fps in DX12 is definitely playable in a slow-paced real-time strategy game like this—albeit with a top-of-the-line processor, which no doubt affects results in a CPU-centric game like this. You’d probably want to drop details to even lower levels in a standard rig.

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