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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  • PopinFRESH007 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    You are simply ignoring the facts. When Bluray players launched they didn't play Blurays because there were none, because there was no standard. It took 3 years before there was a standard and 7 movies were released. Before then they were just high-end DVD players.

    These RTX cards also work out of the box. Its crazy I know, they actually can play current games and all with the highest settings and fastest frame rates. Similar to what happened with bluray, they will also support those new fangled DXR and DLSS options in games as they come out.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    First Blu-ray movies would be released on June 20, coinciding with the release of the first Blu-ray DVD player from Samsung, and a Sony VAIO Blu-ray PC.Jun 13, 2006
    The first batch distributed by Sony was on June 20th, 2006:

    The Fifth Element
    50 First Dates
    Hitch
    House of Flying Daggers
    The Terminator
    Underworld: Evolution
    xXx

    What was that again about facts?
  • V900 - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    Working out of the box? You mean like the RTX 2080/ti/2070 cards?

    You’re willfully ignoring facts and pretend that it’s totally up in the air whether games will support RTX, and that they won’t be available for a long time...

    Which is entirely false.

    There are games that support RTX out right now. Like Tomb Raider

    More are coming this year: One of the biggest titles this year: Battlefield 5 supports it.

    And dozens of titles supporting RTX, many of them big AAA titles, are coming out in H1 2019.

    So no: Nobody is buying a card they “can’t even test.” If you buy an RTX card, it’ll work out of the box with RTX technology enabled.

    And it’s of course also the fastest card on the market for all the old titles that don’t support RTX.
  • sonny73n - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    @V900

    If you can’t compare performance per dollar of this gen and the previous, why even bother praising the new tech when currently none of the tech sites have any mean to test them?

    After reading your first comment, I couldn’t help but think that you’re a paid shill for Nvidia.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 20, 2018 - link

    You just ignored the facts and even proved yourself wrong in own statement. lol

    Let me sell you a car with the fastest engine, but i'm not going to let you use all the Horsepower..but i promise i'll enable it when i get the right parts for it. Don't worry about the $100k price tag on the car, its going to be awesome i swear..

    Do you get paid for every post by nvidia, or just a lump sum?
  • mscsniperx - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    You are comparing apples to oranges. There isn't even a raytracing game to compare to.. And when the truth comes out that even with RTX, there is a massive FPS hit.. well, it's game over.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    First you complain that there aren't any raytracing games to get benchmarks from, then you state there will be a massive performance hit. If there are no games available to test with, you can't have any idea what their performance will be like.
  • tamalero - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    The slides/demos of Nvidia and the Beta of Battlefield brother..
    They show performance that could be potentially be "above" what users would expect.
  • imaheadcase - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Hello Hairworks would like a word with you..
  • CoachAub - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

    Laser discs were a big hit! ;)

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