Gadgetory

in today's content we're talking about individual graphics settings and how they affect FPS when restricted by the CPU whether you play it or not watch starts - presents an interesting opportunity to learn about the impact of TV performance caused by graphics options while stocks - is proven to be both CPU and GPU intensive and is exciting strictly because it's one of the few titles where we're seeing real performance differences between 8 thread and quads dred processors before getting to this the coverage is brought to you by catalyst mints the new energy consumable designs provide focus and energy without the crashes or jitters of energy drink talismans are a new product made in an allergen free FDA registered facility in the USA use code gamers nexus for 5% off at the link in the description below this content peace revitalizes our graphics optimization guides and this time for the first time ever in our testing history is specifically an optimization guide for CPUs so even if you don't play watchdogs - this is still a good opportunity to learn about what types of graphics settings in a game impact CPU performance when your bottleneck on the CPU so for this testing we're obviously trying to isolate the CPU as the choke point and that means we're using a gtx 1080 FTW and we've stepped down the cpu a class - an i-5 6600 K which usually you wouldn't expect much of a bottleneck to come out of a 6600 K but for this game spits well I should say with a big disclaimer there unless you're trying to hit 144 120 Hertz then it matters a lot but normally 60fps stuff like that not a huge deal with this game watchdogs who really leverages the i7 CP is we see big performance gains by going to an i7 more so than just generationally moving between i-5 I've shown in our i5 2500 K revisit so we're using the 6600 K to create a bottleneck and we found a few settings that are cpu dependent looking through the game's graphics options we can use some basic deduction to make immediate assumptions as to what might matter most for the CPU by understanding basic concepts of the graphics pipeline we know for instance that geometry is most likely to involve the CPU heavily and we also know that extra details will likely hurt CP performance as the setting improves geometric complexity mesh detail things like that meanwhile options like anti-aliasing and reflections are largely computed on the GPU side so we don't care about those with this and we know from experience and the basic understanding again of the pipeline that these shouldn't have any real impact on people's performance for test methodology there are a lot of really specific things that we did for this so it's all in the article links of description below that was written by Patrick Layton he did the testing for this particular benchmark and he's got a guide of how to change the settings things like that we'll go through here but the methodology is all in the article so check that out we also have side by side screenshots for comparison between different graphics options but of course YouTube compresses things so you might not be able to see the differences as well as in the article where we'll have some full resolution higher quality images to work with let's start with the presets all totaled again running with just be 16 600 K and 1080 FTW we're generally able to force a CV bottleneck except under extreme condition this first chart shows the performance of strictly the presets even with low settings we're not coming close to the 7700 K is 114 FPS average when it's on the high settings that's big difference there the extra four threads go a long way this scaling shows CPU limitations for the most part as the 7700 K allows for frame rates exceeding 100 FPS with 1080p high the one exception is mac settings which enables that hfts and 100% extra detail that combination means we're introducing somewhat of a GPU bottleneck as well but the other options are primarily seeking you down unfortunately the presets are a one-size-fits-all model and with this game if you're bottlenecking on a CPU because ni5 not quite enough to get full performance you could do some manual tuning to get a mix of ultra high and medium settings that still looks pretty good high is the lowest Cree set that doesn't sacrifice serious graphical quality with watchdog's - and there's an obvious difference in every texture between the high-end medium reflections of texture resolution and geometry all get tossed out the window once you're below High Flow is an excellent example of why this guide is necessary the shadows are jagged textures are blurry even directly next to the player and everything appears flat and monochromatic so we can improve by doing individual settings tuning extra detail starts us off we've got screenshots that show details scaling from zero to 100% extra details again these are in the article if you want to study extra detail has the biggest performance impact and Ubisoft disables extra details and all of the graphics presets which demonstrates that they know this is an issue here's the chart at the highest setting that decreased our frame rates by an impressive twenty four point eight percent when using extra details enabled we're following up from eighty-three FPS average to 62 FPS average and you could extrapolate that fifty percent extra detail likely plants you right in the middle that'd be in the 70s for this particular set up extra detail controls at the level of geometric complexity on all objects even ones in the distance which would normally be replaced with simple easy to render shapes the most visible changes in our screenshots anyway are the distance at which the bus lettering appears in the center lane of the road alongside more detailed buildings and shipping containers and things like that you can also see the cell phone tower in the background has some extra geometry in it and that's really kind of impressive considering how far away it is most improvements are barely noticeable at the street level like additional support struts on the solar panel to the left and the cell phone tower in the center you just don't see that detail come through when you're actually on the ground rather than overlooking everything we'd recommend that even with setting completely off and realign instead on the geometry setting which has a similar effect on building facades and draw distances but isn't nearly as abusive this next chart shows the geometry setting tuning geometry is set to high in our baseline benchmark giving us room to turn it down to medium or low low offered us a five point eight ish percent increase in performance over baseline and Ultra offered about a 10% decrease big change there this shows that geometry is another cpu-bound setting the difference between low and ultra geometry is much more visible than the difference between zero and 100% extra detail so again this is where you want to look for that tuning 1080p with extra detail amp to 100% and 1080p with Ultra geometry and zero percent extra detail appears it virtually identical but the extra detail version performs far worse so again if you need more proof geometry is the way to go if you're wondering why geometry has such an impact on CPU performance it's because it's largely a matter draw calls to see if you must hand off each primitive and Poli individually to the GPU and that bogs down the render pipeline in an early stage of the processing for each frame with DirectX 11 this is a bigger issue though DirectX 12 hasn't really shown too much promise yet because developers are still learning how to implement it the next few tests all show much smaller impact on the CPU as the more GPU limited conditions that watchdogs to as three reflection settings and including water and all of these should be handled by the GPU for the most part the water setting effect water reflections are not physics so again that means it's really a negligible impact on the CPU high or possibly ultra reflections we think are a must with any decent GPU as they dramatically improve the appearance of vehicles and windows and if you have a decent GPU on your CPUs kind of week this is a place where you could turn up the settings maybe even to ultra and not really lose any performance terrain settings were initially promising as a CPU limited option but we found through testing that it only controls the textures of different terrain and Notley terrain geometry at least not visibly we didn't notice any significant visual changes and it's unlikely that this setting will improve much of anything outside of potential vram consumption vegetation controls the rendered distance of more detailed trees which are confusingly also affected by the extra detail setting so that kind of does impact everything vegetation didn't have any significant impact within the bounds of our benchmark course which contains a reasonable number of trees but it didn't have a visual impact overall the setting should be left at least on high unless performance is specifically dropping in forested areas so we've got a limited selection of CPU binding options in watch dogs too but this sets the stage for learning more about when you can afford the tuned specific settings like geometry rather than other settings like reflections because again let's say you're running on kind of a mixed setup like we have a GTX 1080 or something like that some powerful GPU and an i-5 60 600 K maybe not the most common set up but if you have something like that close to it anyway then what you can see is that with the 6600 K there's this weird bottleneck that we can get an extra bit of performance out of the 1080 even if you open a GP monitoring tool gtz you'll see that there's room for the 1080 to continue operating and pump out higher settings quality but the CP limits us so what you could do in that scenario is again tune down things like geometry turn off extra detail because that's a cpu thing tuned down geometry and then increase things like reflections all with the ultra if you wanted to text your detail increase that to ultra as well because they're not going to hit the CPU that much so your options would more or less look like ultra ultra ultra all the way down except for maybe geometry which you have on medium or something like that or high depending on how how you want your frame rate to be so that's all for this video if you want to fund more things like this as always a patreon link in the post roll video you can go to patreon.com/crashcourse maxis we have some goals there that are a few have been reached but some more coming up and with that funding we can do more of this testing and do individual graphics research for games I think the next plan is to do something let's overwatch so stay tuned for that subscribe for more links to the description below I'll see you all next time you