Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and this is our benchmark of call of duty black ops 3 which is a fairly intensive single-player and multiplayer game of course FPS as you all know very well so we benchmarked cod black ops 3 on various video cards we had several configurations more than 10 actually and we also tested a few other things like memory consumption sort of loose testing there and vram consumption so all of that is contained in the article linked in the description below but we have some of it here especially the core elements and a recap of the benchmark performance at 1080 1440 and 4k using various settings within the game there aren't too many settings in the game and most of them are already understood or defined that our other guides but the one setting to pay attention to here is filmic SMAA which is an anti-aliasing technology that applies temporarily so it's similar in concept in that way to something like Nvidia's TX AAA with filmic SMAA the idea comes from film film it and that is to create a more cinematic gaming experience in the minds of those who implement filmic asmaa so what does it do well it looks at the previous frames the current frame and other frames temporally so it looks at everything around what you're currently processing and it determines how the pixels should be filtered and how the anti-aliasing should be applied in the next frames so this reduces the pixel marching effect you get sometimes in games like with jagged edges and things of that nature with movement and dynamic elements and is something that is generally recommended on but it does impact performance a bit so we did some loose performance testing on filmic SMAA before getting into our GPU benchmarks because we didn't want to run our full suite of cards without understanding how it impacts performance the findings are generally that filmic SMAA creates a hit to performance of about six point five percent so you get six point five percent lower frame rate on average but with some cards like the gtx 960 which is a lower end card and other lower end cards the performance hit grows so it's more to the tune of ten or twelve percent on your other settings and the resolution and things like that we left this on for a lot of our tests but we disabled it for some and you will find that information in the article but in general any test that is marked extra that's what called duty calls ultra is going to have SMAA enabled except for in the case of the SLI configuration because with call duty you actually can't enable some of the anti-aliasing technologies with SLI because it creates too much for performance it so this is actually disabled in the game it cannot be enabled through the games menu so we tested with and without it talking about test methodology for a bit before we jump into the benchmarks Call of Duty has some unique challenges we face for benchmarking in order to produce a trustworthy benchmark for this game we had to spend several hours checking FPS vram consumption memory consumption and stability in various regions of the game we tested freerunning which is a mode we test the first campaign level multiplayer with and without players present and the ready room i'll call it and we found that cogs single-player and multiplayer performance metrics are separated by a vast delta with single player outputting about thirty eight point six percent lower frame rate than multiplayer in some instances we ultimately decided to run our benchmarks in a custom multiplayer course already uploaded to the channel but shown again here as we figure this is what most cod players are probably interested in if you're into the single-player just subtract about thirty eight percent of the performance from these results to get your worst case expectation of single-player FPS that is what the first level puts you through it's fairly intensive what you've been looking at a little bit is the benchmark course it's conducted on redwood this was a 30 second test run that was executed three times for parody on each card and we found that the redwood map provided some of the most intensive graphics elements in the game and decided to use that as our benchmark you can find the full bench specs in the chart on the website if you're interested in the CPU the RAM and all of that let's get right into this once we move to sli testing at 4k we observed severe frame drops that seemed to uncharacteristic of the graphics hardware used for testing to further analysis we ran resource monitoring tools including res mon and check system memory usage and this is what we found so you can see at the hydrographic settings at 4k black ops 3 had committed 15.2 gigabytes of ram out of our total 32 gigabyte capacity and this was with a working set of six point seven gigabytes that six point seven gigabytes working set accounts for the physical memory consumption without page fault and the 15.2 number represents the virtual memory consumption or the page will address space and this isn't much better at other setting levels but it is a bit better we saw closer to 11 gigabytes commit size during some of our 1080p tests and either way it's clear that safety dictates and eight gigabyte physical memory allowance for black ops sort of at a minimum and you might want more than that depending on your settings needs we saw a full saturation of the GPS on card memory also called vram when running 4k and Max on a 980 TI so that's six gigabytes of vram that was being tapped into actively for 4k at Ultra and it was also utilized at the slightly lower resolution so it is a fairly memory consumption happy game in that regard looking at black ops 3 at 4k and extra which is call of duty is ultra equivalent there's no surprise that 4k is intensive and effectively a fantasy to play it's basically opting into multiple high on GPUs just to be able to play 4k with call of duty's higher settings so that's a thirteen hundred dollar purchase for just getting the game up and running at a playable FPS with 4k lower settings would make it more doable but it may just be better to dip to 1440p for this one check the article for more information on this at 1440p which is the heir apparent to 1080p we saw that 1440p proves demanding enough that anything shy of a gtx 970 or r9 390 which is not present on these charts because we have the send it back would require lower settings to meet 2560 x 1440 of for the screen resolution the r9 290x could achieve a higher framerate with some tuning like dropping settings down to medium but it's not much use at 1440p and max as for the test everyone cares about here the 1080p extra which again equivalent to ultra benchmark is likely at most you are seeking running black ops 3 at 1080p max settings we see the sli gtx 980 TI is unsurprisingly leading by large margins but keep in mind that you can't enable filmic SMAA for the 980 I so that is actually contributing to its performance gain the one percent and point one percent low times of the SLI configuration fronts a larger disparity against its average than other cards but it brushes it aside with raw FPS output moving to more reasonable configurations we see the single 980 TI reference running at 133 average with tight low percent timings and the r9 390 exit lags behind the gtx 980 non ti a little bit both cards are from MSI but also remains a cheaper card by seventy dollars the GTX 970 tags along behind the r9 390 X but struggles a little more with its point one percent low FPS and notably for andy the r9 390 x did present impressively tight timings on the one percent and point one percent low metrics it's not until you drop two gtx 950 or thereabout that the FPS falls below 60 owners of the 952 270x on the r7 370 which is not present on the bench and the gtx 750ti will be forced to lower settings note that the 285 was removed from our 1080p bench as it encounters issues which produce unplayable frame rates and we're researching the root cause of this in an attempt to determine whether it's a problem with black ops or the AMD driver but for now we've just removed the 285 from the 1080p benchmark here's the chart showing medium settings with a a disabled if you own a lower end card and you can find more information on this one on the website that's all for our call of duty black ops 3 GPU benchmark check the website for more information and we're going to be looking at this for other components as well like the CPUs that we have and RAM but overall for GPU purposes it looks like you're going to want somewhere in the range of a 960 or 380 if you're playing at more conservative settings and if you're playing at higher settings it's good as always to look toward the 970 and the r9 390 depending on how high you want to go with the settings and you can check our charts as a reference for where you need to be there and again the article does make more conclusions on specific GPUs if you want to figure out more precisely what you should buy based on our recommendations so as always thanks for watching it hit the patreon link in the postural video if you want to support us making more content like this very time consuming but it's a lot of fun so that's all for the black ops 3 benchmark I will see you all next time