You can toggle Async Compute on and off in Ashes of the Singularity with the "AsyncComputeOff" flag in the Settings Initialization file. Over the last couple of weeks I have worked through both AMD and Intel CPUs toggling Asynch Compute on and off with both AMD and NVIDIA video cards. The fact is that even on the highest end of the performance spectrum, the biggest frames per second increase we saw was 3 frames per second; from 90.5 to 93.3...a whopping 3% increase, which I would suggest is within our margin of error. That said, I was able to reproduce that increase consistently, so I would suggest that the increase is "real" even inside our MoE. Generally though, we would see gains of less than 1 frame per second when toggling between Async on and Async off.

It would seem to me that while AotS is being held up as the go-to Async Compute game, it is far from it. However, going back to what the developer said, it would seem that Asynch Compute advantages might be much better realized under CrossFire and possibly SLI on the PC. We will test that in the future hopefully.

Another big feature, which we are also using on Xbox One, is asynchronous compute. This allows us to re-use GPU power that would otherwise go to waste, and do multiple tasks in parallel. And there is a never before seen level of control over NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX configurations, which means that as a developer we can take full control over those systems and ensure users get a great experience with them.

Kollock, a developer at Oxide, went as far as to publicly post on the Overclock.net forum, "Regarding Async compute, a couple of points on this. FIrst, though we are the first D3D12 title, I wouldn't hold us up as the prime example of this feature. There are probably better demonstrations of it. This is a pretty complex topic and to fully understand it will require significant understanding of the particular GPU in question that only an IHV can provide. I certainly wouldn't hold Ashes up as the premier example of this feature." Given that, I think we are on target with our thoughts about AotS and Async Compute.