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. NVIDIA Adaptive Shading was not enabled.

In summary, Wolfenstein II tends to scales well, enables high framerates with minimal CPU bottleneck, enjoys running on modern GPU architectures, and consumes VRAM like nothing else. For the Turing-based RTX 2060 (6GB), this results in outpacing the GTX 1080 as well as RX Vega 56 at 1080p/1440p. The 4K results can be deceiving; looking closer at 99th percentile framerates shows a much steeper dropoff, more likely than not to be related to the limitations of the 6GB framebuffer. We've already seen the GTX 980 and 970 struggle at even 1080p, chained by 4GB video memory.

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  • richough3 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link

    I would wait a few generations before I would purchase a video card for it's ray tracing abilities. The main reason I would buy any high end card is for FPS, because in competitive gaming, FPS is king, so any visual quality feature would be at minimum setting or turned off anyway.
  • nunya112 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link

    AMD is about to have its best year for video cards mark my words!
    NVidia have launched a product that while on paper and technology wise is awesome. however. the physical hardware Is not capable to use that technology. im referring to RTX its too slow. And NV is asking a premium for it. NVidia has made AMD's job very easy.
    all AMD hasto do is. provide good cards MUCH CHEAPER and they will own at least 50% of GPU market.
  • webdoctors - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link

    Yo how much do you get paid to post? Can I do it too from home? We can split the referral bonus. Make me an offer, could use quick cash.
  • nunya112 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link

    I bought a 580 8gb for 199 Australian just before Xmas. was because they all had excess supply again from all the miners. well we all know what happened there! It crashed faster than a meth head would on sunday afternoon after being up for 3 days. and they all had ROOMS full of video cards. knowing one of the bigger etailers boss personally. they had so much excess stock. they were going to throw out low end cards because they didnt have room for more expensive products in the warehouse! for instance they had 6 pallets of of gigabyte aurorus 580's and the next day 590's were being delivered. luckily when they dropped to $199AU a lot of ppl picked them up. they still made a profit.
    moral here is AMD needs to compete with NV for nothing. set their own low prices that they still make 15% on and spank NV
  • Sherlock - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link

    Couple of points :
    1) Nvidia's strategy - which seems to have backfired - was to hope that RayTracing will take off in a big way - and put all its eggs in that basket. Nvidia added in specialized hardware to support RT, which has effectively priced it out of the mainstream market and has to add in "features" like DLSS to convince the consumer that they are getting a good deal @ $350 for what is essentially a 1080p class GPU - equivalent performance from the "traditional" GPU's is available ~$200
    2) RayTracing will not take off until it is supported on the XBox and PS as a majority of the games are developed with those platforms in mind. Considering AMD is rumored (confirmed??) to supply the CPU/GPU for the next-gen consoles - unless AMD starts supporting RayTracing this gen - Nvidia has essentially wasted hardware resources and consumer money on something that is completely useless. By the time we have software that uses RT in a meaningful way - these Nvidia cards will be redundant
  • nunya112 - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link

    it wont take off because the current hardware can not run it very well. its good on paper, and great to show. but this should have been released next year with a faster chip. because when RTX is on FPS hits so low.
  • CiccioB - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link

    Next year, with the right HW, nvidia wll have all developers ready to create optimized RT games (unlike BF5). You just look a the finger, not what it it point at.
    And if the weapon in AMD hands is slowing the technological progress because they have the monopoly in the console market, well, let me say it, I hope that AMD will die soon.
  • saiga6360 - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link

    Foolish. If you think nvidia can bring ray tracing to the masses by its lonesome, then you are dreaming. They have to charge you hundreds and thousands just for that finger as you call it, that must be the middle finger because it's not going to get the point across. Just for anything to become a standard, be it 2K, 4K, adaptive sync, it needs to be affordable and for that to happen AMD and Intel needs to get on board.
  • 808Hilo - Friday, January 11, 2019 - link

    Nvidia marketing fantasy to counter another nonsensical product...580. Just build one top card and sell many. Then build another one. As it seems we are stuck on 1080 performance four years in a row. Lame.
  • Ravenmaster - Saturday, January 12, 2019 - link

    It's a 1070Ti

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