Graphics card performance

We test at Ultra quality settings. Your sweet spot might be high quality and 1080P if you have less then 3GB of graphics memory. 3GB graphics memory (often referred to as VRAM) really is a sweet-spot for the game. For PC gaming your goal always should be 60+ FPS. However, we say 40~45 FPS for a game of this type should be your threshold, while 60 FPS (frames per second) or higher can be considered optimal.

** Update: Nvidia released a new driver which massively impacts performance. The results have been updated but we'd not be surprized to see something similar happening with AMD drivers. hence the results today remain subjective. The game is incredible hard to measure objectively.

** Update #2: after lots of weird results with graphics card that have less then 4 GB of VRAM we found out that the problematic settings is Shadow cache. If you have an up-to 4 GB graphics card, please turn it off and you'll be playing properly. The charts are now updated to reflect that.

The type of game you play is always relevant though, an first person shooter game is nice at 50 to 60 fps , an online shooter on a 144Hz monitor feels better at 100+ fps. And totally on the opposing side, for RPG gaming things are different for which we are comfortable with an FPS ranging as low as 30~35 FPS. At all times if your framerate is low, you can opt to change in-game image quality settings. Mind you that we test with reference cards or cards that have been clocked at reference frequencies. Factory tweaked graphics cards obviously can run up-to 20% faster. But for the generic overview, we treat all card the same.







In the video above you can see a GeForce GTX 1080 rendering the game @ 1920x1080

A bit of a mess ...

Yes the results are all over the place. The game can jump from 100 to 50 FPS in no time. The frame-drops are massive making the FPS recordings very difficult. We also see very weird behaviour for the Fury series and for Nvidia the GTX 970/980 the results have been so weird that we cannot trust a steady FPS mark, hence we left them out. It is weird to observe among many other things. The good news though with all the performance differences, the overall framerate is easily above the 40 FPS marker, so the weird FPS fluctuations for pretty much any card are at a speed that you will hardly notice it, at 1080P that is.

For both Nvidia and AMD their latest generation cards however excel, Polaris works extremely well as well as all Pascal GPUs for Nvidia.