Gadgetory

hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers next astana and this is our fallout 4 benchmark so we already posted the GPU benchmark on the website and that has all the FPS metrics the charts vram memory consumption things like that you can find that links in the description below but this is the video recap of that and first of all we already posted a bench course for Fallout 4 so this course basically runs through one of the more intensive areas of the game and creates a mix the GPU workload so the objective of this course was to stress the GPU pretty heavily at the beginning and end of the test but create a more realistic representation of the game walk around less intensive parts of the city during the middle of the test and that creates a mixed workload so we have the ability to look at the worst case scenario and sort of the average slash best case scenario in the middle that is on the website and on the channel already and it was rendered at 1080p but the test was actually conducted in all three resolutions and the video for the bench course was recorded at 4k so it was down sampled to 1080p when we rendered it out because of some limitations in YouTube regarding the framerate can't do 60fps and 4k so that's why that happened let's take a look at some of the settings before diving into the FPS results and fallout 4 so fallout 4 has a good amount of settings but it is built on the same creation engine as used for Skyrim and previous Fallout games this means that the eye and eye tweaking is the same as previously for the most part there in some new and some removed ini lines that you can add or remove from the text files but overall it's the same idea where you can modify fallout 4 perhaps to I and I and other fallout 4 ini files to do some tweaking and then other than that when you launch the game you're presented with a splash screen it's got the options page and in that setting window you can change your graphics to different levels obviously so this is what that looks like and we've got a full description of what all these options do on the website just at a top level if you're curious about what any of one of them does in particular fallout 4 has simple settings overall and it's big on view distances because it's open-world game so part of the reason aside from software optimization that fallout 4 gets hit hard for fps in some areas is because of the far drawing distances especially as it pertains to things like shadows object detail and items of that nature an FPS first person shooter like black ops 3 might look better and hosts objectively superior engine and graphics technology as we found in our article on that but it does not draw nearly as far as an open-world game will do so you have to keep that perspective in mind when looking at these benchmarks if you're trying to compare it against other games because it's not necessarily a linear comparison we found in some loose preliminary testing that shadowdistance creates one of the biggest hits to FPS to the tune of about sixteen point seven percent between its lowest and highest highest setting so that is one of the first items to tune if you're running into issues with game performance our graphics options are defined in the article in the description below as is our bench spec and complete testing methodology including answers to your driver questions a quick recap on the test methodology though and videos unreleased fallout 4 drivers were used for testing those drivers are now available but they were unreleased at the time of testing and those include fallout 4 optimizations the latest AMD Catalyst drivers 15 dot 11 badda were used for testing and game settings were configured to ultra with ultra overrides were not selected medium and low presets were also run at 1080p and then Ultra presets were run at 1080 1440 and 4k resolutions once we determined which settings provided a reasonable level of load for appropriate video cards we forged forward testing those configurations on our suite of GPUs and we also asked AMD if they would have fallout 4 specific drivers to which the company said that they weren't ready yet so we ended up using the 15 dot 11 beta until a point at which and the release is updated drivers each scenario was tested for 30 seconds identically then repeated three times for parody we tested in diamond city the first major Township that the player reaches and we found parts of Diamond City to produce highly intensive load with a performance gap as wide as nearly 60% in some instances this makes time city a somewhat poorly optimized region of the game that represents a mixed workload scenario which is excellent for testing our test run begins with the camera pointed toward a heavily occupied region of the city and then moves around a much less intensive corridor the result is a mixed GPU workload that is 100% reproducible and representative of real-world play experiences benchmarks that don't precisely emulate our course will have different results so when you look around at other sites running these benchmarks do keep in mind the test methodology matters there's can be correct for their particular bench course but ours may be different because we do some specific things in our bench run that may not be emulated in other tests as far as our preliminary and somewhat unofficial V RAM and RAM testing we looked at some of the V RAM and RAM consumption just to understand the nature of the beast it wasn't really the intent to do a super accurate published bit of information on this but I'll go ahead and put this out there anyway fallout 4 commits about four point eight gigabytes of virtual memory and uses a working set of about 2.4 gigabytes so that's physical Ram consumption of less than three gigabytes and then total system Ram consumption including virtual memory of about four point eight to five gigabytes as for vram the same 1080 max settings that we used for testing the quick memory consumption pushed around 2.6 to 2.9 gigabytes of vram at any time using 1080 max and then you consume more for 4k obviously so do keep that in mind as well some quick anti-aliasing testing was done to look at the performance hit by taa which is Beth as does fallout 4 highest anti-aliasing setting we saw that in our bench course the impact was about three percent so we decided to leave taa on for ultra test even at 4k and the reason I point this out is because a lot of the time with 4k you don't need anti-aliasing because it's 4k let's get into the charts here 4k is effectively unplayable on single GPU solutions when using ultra settings but is achievable by dropping down a tier so too high or medium high the 390x gtx 980 and 980ti all struggle with the 980ti pushing 46 average FPS and 46 is near playable and fallout since it's not like a competitive FPS game where speed is of critical importance when it comes to framerate we found that around 50 fps feels pretty good for Fallout 4 though obviously wanna be closer to 60 and that's where I present interval will kick in and cap you moving to 1440 as expected and these shows it's difference-maker in the higher resolution tests the r9 390x lands fittingly between the gtx 970 and msi gtx 980 fallout 4 is reasonably played at 1440 on cards of equivalent or superior class 2 the r9 290x and gtx 970 the r9 285 and gtx 960 cards are unable to withstand the cycle and bandwidth saturation of 1440 so we have to look towards 1080 for that as for 1080 let's talk obvious things first and I'm gonna read this straight from my article just so everything is very clearly explained the 1080p GPU benchmark as you'll see places a gtx 970 above and r9 390x by about 5.1 percent which doesn't necessarily seem right but in some other games this happens as well though rarely and we did not expect this to happen in fallout 4 so I set forth to validate the findings spent a couple hours trying to figure it out and we thought we'd located the setting creating the 970 lead when tweaking each option and eventually noticed that shadowdistance impacted results by nearly 20 FPS for these particular two cards and that's enough to close the gap but then when I tested this on the 970 as well it reproduced the result so the 970 maintained its a couple FPS lead over the 390 X when setting the other settings down lower the gap was still the same and I've recently found that volumetric lighting can be toggled in ini files so I'm going to try that next but overall the 390 X is outperformed by the GTX 970 and the same 5% gap is present throughout all the tests that we've run at this particular resolution and setting and things like that this leads me to believe that the gap is either a game optimization issue or a driver optimization it and we contacted AMD as I said late last week in search of the four day one drivers but we were told that the drivers weren't ready yet so we ran with fifteen dot eleven beta which just came out for black ops it is possible at 390 X will outpace the 970 at 1080p with a driver update or game optimization patch but as the data stands right now that's how it is and then finally here are some medium and low settings benchmarks just to quickly put those out there for anyone who has lower and the cards but at the end of the day the thing with fallout 4 is that it does not look impressive but that doesn't mean it's a bad game certainly aren't everything and we say this in our review where we actually liked the game quite a bit Michael Kern's reviewed it for the site and you can read that on the website gamers nexus net where he says that he really likes the game despite some of its quirky bugginess has his common with bethesda titles and the odd graphics optimization and graphics appearance in general the aesthetic overall is good and fitting of the Fallout series but the graphics just aren't technologically impressive so what video cards are best we discussed this in the article but to quickly recap the r9 285 and gtx 960 are both decent performers depending on what you're looking for and the 285 is effectively superseded by the r9 380 so we're eye buying a card to play at 1080 and close to ultra or at Ultra I would go for the 960 or the r9 380 those are the two options that will provide the best price to performance ratio and those are about $200 so that's kind of where I would land for that unless you want to go overkill and spend more money but in terms of what's required the 380 and the 960 makes the most sense looking at 1440 the 390 X is really the best price to performance here it has solid performance at higher resolutions like 1440 it outperforms on videos similarly priced at 970 at this range and that's probably where I would steer toward unless I specifically wanted a 970 in which case that's the only real and video option in terms of price to performance and then the 980 will get you a bit closer to the higher frame rates that you want which is a $500 card so that's kind of where I am with it as far as 4k goes it's really not at Ultra settings with a single GPU right now so you've got to either look toward multi-gpu solutions or you have to look toward dropping your settings a bit down to high or medium or something like that or mix of high and ultra so that is all for the fallout 4 benchmark check the article in the description below and if you like this kind of content please check out our patreon page down here in the postural video and I will see you all next time