Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)

id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.

Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.

The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.

Wolfenstein II 1920x1080 2560x1440 3840x2160
Average FPS
99th Percentile

I am actually impressed with Wolfenstein II and its Vulkan implementation more than the absurd 250+ framerates, if only because many other games hold back the GPU because of the occurring CPU bottleneck. In DOOM, there was a hard 200fps cap because of engine/implementation limitations, a bit of a corner case, but manufacturers make 240Hz monitors nowadays, too. On a GPU performance profiling side, of course, reducing the CPU bottleneck makes comparing powerful GPUs much easier at 1080p, and with a better signal-to-noise than at 4K.

This is combined with the fact that at 4K, the 20 series are looking a huge 60 to 68% lead over the 10 series, and we'll be cross-referencing these performance deltas with other sections of the game. Even in the case of a 'flat-track bully' scenario where the 2080 Ti is running up the score, the 2080 Ti's speed compared to the 2080 is somewhat less than expected at 24 to 27%. It's a somewhat intriguing result for an optimized Vulkan game, as the game runs and scales generally well across the board; It's also not unnoticed that both the RX Vega cards and GeForce Turing cards outperform their expected positions, though without the graphics workload details it's hard to speculate with substance. With framerates like these, the 4K HDR dream at 144 Hz is a real possibility, and it would be interesting to compare with Titan V and Titan Xp results.

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  • Vayra - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    Why would I want a feature like DLSS when current AA methods do the job fine and we can also just run at native, higher resolution anyway and not use any AA whatsoever?

    And why would anyone care about vaporware like RTRT?
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, September 22, 2018 - link

    No DLSS, NO.

    Blur.

    Not capable of raytracing, just raytrace small parts of a frame on selected scenes on selected games...
  • Gastec - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    You must be joking right? What do we care if the price of manufacturing increased for Nvidia. We are mot supporters, we are clients. We don't have to support their pricing because WE ARE NOT SOCIOS! Let Nvidia reduce their costs by cutting the salaries of their CEOs and other wortless corporate officers. Then I will BUY their 2080Ti product, at the consumer-friendly price of €750
  • Andrew LB - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Except for the fact that the non founders edition is $999, not $1200. And the GTX 1080ti released at $699 but for the better part of the past two years cost substantially more.
  • eva02langley - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Then find one at that price, genius.

    3rd parties are OC their cards and offering additional cooling solutions, they will all be over the MSRP and close to the FE.

    Also, they use GDDR6... you didn't learn anything from Vega and HBM2?
  • jeffcd57 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Agree the cost is ridiculous. I haven't paid it and won't. Got to many children to raise. I've never seen them at the above mentioned.
  • jeffcd57 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    1080 Ti for $600, where, when?
  • ezridah - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    A month ago.

    https://www.theverge.com/good-deals/2018/8/21/1776...
  • TheJian - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    So buy a 1080ti. For some the new features are worthy and boost perf quite massively making it truly worth it if those technologies are the new way forward. At worst, a good 25 games are already coming with NV's new tech. Many are huge titles most would like to play surely.

    Also as Hexus noted a while back, the price to make these things is just below MSRP. Note the small chip is as large as a titan, and the larger chips...WOW. That's a lot of transistors for a game card. Also apples vs. oranges here, as said by others 1080 etc can't do raytracing or dlss.

    https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-rtx-plat...
    27 games coming with NV tech. Will they look the same on 1080ti or less? NOPE. Will they be faster and BETTER looking on RTX...YEP. Value is in the eye of the beholder ;)
  • Spunjji - Friday, September 21, 2018 - link

    The problem is, you just counted twice when you said "will they be faster and better looking on RTX".

    The absolute truth of it from what little we can glean so far (after the official launch!!!) is that you can have RTX effects /OR/ you can have your better performance, not both. That's a heavy caveat!

    It would be one thing if it were a proposition of waiting a couple of months for some amazing features that will knock your socks off and have few drawbacks. It's another to be paying over the odds for a card now to maybe get some cool stuff that will DEFINITELY run slower and at a lower res than you're used to.

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