Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and this is our Just Cause at three video card benchmark so obviously looking at all the different GPS that we have and the Nvidia alike and testing them on the new square enix published game Just Cause 3 which is a continuation of a somewhat long-standing series at this point it's basically an open-world destroy things game and that makes it interesting to benchmark it's a unique challenge and there's submit there's some cool graphics tech in the game there's some technology for the global illuminations for water and for things like that that enable the very law and view distances this is part of being an open world is that you can see very far obviously so there's some level of detail scaling that's fairly intensive compared to what you might find in other games of the open-world nature Skyrim as an old example has always been very reserved in its presentation of detail and if you look at the LOD the level of detail and the view distances that's sort of where they're able to preserve performance they don't actually draw that many objects very far with Just Cause 3 a lot of stuff still gets drawn pretty far out things like active objects actors which would be characters cars other vehicles things like that don't get drawn too far away but with the terrain you can see pretty far with the landscape in general the water you can see that it's not as high-quality as if you were up close but the general idea here is that there's a lot of detail and it goes pretty far away in terms of view distance so some of the more interesting items in terms of graphics settings you can find the full list in the article by the way length of the description below if you want to learn more about the graphic settings in Just Cause 3 but off the top here the most interesting ones would generally be water detail first and foremost because that is a game works enabled technology within Just Cause 3 so that would be part of the Nvidia game works suite which as all of you know is sometimes controversial but at the end of the day it's in there so we got to talk about it that is called wave works the specific implementation of the game works toolkit that is that is in there as wave works and that helps enable things like Crest's and wakes behind ships and players and all kinds of splash effects and things like that so that is in there and then there's also water tessellation tessellation we've talked about a few times now there's a good video on the channel already where we talked to someone from Epic Games about tessellation what it is what it means regaining but to recap quickly tessellation is effectively multiplication of triangles so in a game world most things are compared all things actually are comprised of some sort of triangle or quad or some very basic rudimentary geometry this table as an example this table is a rectangle in real life in a game it might be drawn as two triangles kind of divided down the middle with tessellation what you do is you take the triangles that are that are already being used to create an object the composition of an object and you multiply them and that multiplication creates greater apparent depth and I use the word apparent very specifically it looks like there's more detail you can see more bumps and roughness and grit in the surface for example and that is done through tessellation so water tessellations in here specifically for water it basically makes it look more like a natural fluid rather than kind of a weird glue-like substance that you might find in some games the next thing is Elodie factor so Elodie is level of detail talks about it a bit already and that just scales how much details in different types of graphics elements within the game as you distance yourself from them so for example meshes a mesh is a really easy example meshes it's just like real life meshes where you have sort of a almost a wire frame frame underlying the whatever the model is so think of a clay model right you have a wire frame of a car and on top of that you put your clay so there's your mesh and your modeling going on with the LOD factor scaling it down will reduce the complexity and the appearance of detail or depth of different objects in the game to include their host meshes and it also scales down things like textures so textures will pop in a bit slower depending on your LOD scaling and they will also have the lower resolutions rendered for a longer period as you approach them with lower LOD scaling so that's the other one and then global illumination is pretty important this is the item that deals with reflections and interacting with bounces of light so when you have a light source in a game you have the light source a cast array of light and it hits an object and it illuminates that object with global illumination you're saying I'm going to take this ray of light that's hitting a car and now we're going to look at the car we're going to say ok this is a metallic surface this has some reflectivity to it and we're going to bounce that light off of the metallic surface appropriate to the reflectivity or whatever index the game developers are using to determine how reflective that object is then you trace the light through its bounces until it stops bounty until it actually runs out of energy will call it so that's global illumination lowering that or turning it off in this instance will just eliminate the multi bounced lighting will call it and so that makes your light in a bit more simplistic but it saves your own performance methodology is defined in the article if you want to learn about how we tested this there are some pretty specific things going on and the main thing is we have very high and high settings that were tested when we say hi what we mean is we changed all the options to say the word high and then we also disabled ssao global illumination motion blur and screen space reflections to create our version of high settings because there are no presets very high we turned it all on and said it's very high and for AAA we always used FXAA for the anti-aliasing our benchmark course is already separately on the channel at max graphics but you can see it again in this video if not right now and that course shows the obligatory completion of missions that were at the very beginning of the game so we've already completed those first few missions that you have to complete and we're now released freely into the open world and that is when we started the benchmark search so I looked at a few different things here and the main items that I looked at included combat and destruction included grass hills foliage and geometry and we also looked at cities which would be included in that dense geometry things like action elements cars combat again with different levels of movement or different items used to fight like grenades and exclusives to looked at all that stuff and ultimately determined that when running on this one line segment up a grass hill we had the most intensive experience with the game out of all the other stuff so the city's weren't nearly as intensive at least the ones that I was able to test and the combat although it was intensive it seems to be a general theme that anything which was highly explosive like all of the fuel tanks and silos and things like that they all tended to be in areas of low geometric or object complexity so you actually had a higher average fps and then when you blew that stuff up it ate into that and ultimately produced a low FPS during the explosions that was similar and comparable to what we see in our grassland fields benchmark so we went with that because you want to reduce any chance of test variants you want to be a hundred percent reproducible and reliable in your results and so we want to eliminate any type of dynamic element within the game or possible that's where we came up with our worst-case scenario so again this is a worst-case scenario you will generally have higher FPS when you're grappling around or traveling through cities or what have you but other words times the charts you'll see here are what you can expect for game play and it's it's it's fairly complex in terms of the search that we set forth and you can learn more about that and all of our other GPU test methodology pieces where we talked about how we test games let's get started with 4k unlike competitive shooters Just Cause 3 doesn't demand for a constantly high FPS we found that the game is fairly playable at 50 FPS average and there's some negative impact to fluidity once you drop below 50 FPS but generally it's playable at about that range obviously more is better for the most part with some limitations but you won't need the exact 60 that we normally do for some shooters the gtx 980 TI runs Just Cause 3 at just under 50 FPS average when at 4k and high that's all high settings with the disabled FX options that we already mentioned the one percent and 0.1 percent lows are pretty bad really and they both run under 30 FPS so that makes for some unpleasant spikey periods of gameplay but this is a worst-case benchmark design so generally if you tweak a few settings down on the 980 TI it will be a fairly fluid playing experience until the worst case scenarios at which point it will still be playable it just hit some wacky times there is effectively zero sli scaling revealed in our testing and we talked on video about this it is a known issue they're working on it they're implementing new updates to the drivers and so forth to improve SLI scaling a single gtx 980 i right now is about as good as two of them at least in this case and you'll see that trend continues more or less through the other charts the gtx 980 runs at 40.5 FPS average at 4k and the 390 x hits 42 FPS average a bit higher neither of these cards though produces a frame rate we really find comfortable for play and the settings or resolution would have to be tweaked to make them better for playability the gtx 980 TI at 1440p however runs Just Cause 3 at about 65 FPS average so that's 1440p and very high with the lows at about half of that the gtx 980 is 16.7 percent behind the 980 I and is playable at 55 FPS on our worst case scenario the 390 X also hits 55 FPS making it playable though does so with lower one percent and 0.1 percent frame rate so that be 22.5 vs. 30 + 20.5 verse 28 pretty big difference there and generally not pleasant but it's still within playable range and you can make some tweaks to improve that looking further down the list we see the r9 290x is still playable at its 51 FPS average output with the GTX 970 trailing just behind and again I'd recommend some settings tweaks to both of these cards to maybe drop high to medium something like that to keep a more consistent 50-plus FPS and I left crossfire tests in this particular chart because it demonstrates a lack of crossfire scaling at this time a future driver will likely resolve this but right now there's zero crossfire scaling and SLI scaling is very small it's what Cup will present that very best so multi-gpu configurations are not too happy with this game right now look into 1080p at very high this is probably the key setting or most users will be targeting with this configuration anything including and north of the r9 380 effectively equivalent to the r9 285 in the above chart because we don't have a 380 anymore it was on loan or the gtx 960 for gigabyte at 210 dollars would be sufficient for Just Cause 3 but you'd probably want to make a few settings tweak to the lower end cards like the 3 80 to 85 and 9 60s for better sustained frame rates during intensive periods the 9 64 gigabyte and 962 gigabytes show a small disparity to FPS or 4.3 percent but nothing nearly as interesting as what we saw on AC syndicate you can check that content if you're curious about the tubers for gigabyte disparity take a look at the r9 390 X in this charge so again we're looking at the 1080 and very high chart 3 90 X versus the GTX 970 at very high the 390 X leads the 970 by a couple percent so you're at 75 or 71 FPS the 390 X also stands higher one present low FPS so commit that to memory for a moment and we'll come back to it in a couple of minutes here or less moving down to high and disabling some of the FX like guess Sao go illumination excuse me screen space reflections and so forth FPS improves considerably on most GPUs and this is particularly visible at the low end where the somewhat aged and decrepit r9 270x once a powerhouse for the budget class now enters a range of relative playability despite poor 1% in 0.1 percent low frame times the GTX 950 is outperformed by the r9 285 and thus the r9 380 marginally with the r9 380 x taking a more lead of five point nine percent over the gtx 960 cards now here's the part that we're bringing back from every the gtx 970 is at 102 FPS average which leads the r9 390 X in this benchmark something we've seen recently in other titles especially those that make use of tessellation heavily like fallout and Assassin's Creed is that the 970 does actually leave the 390 acts in a lot of games these days 390 X however appears advantaged at the highest quality setting which is the one we looked at a moment ago but loses ground at lower quality settings so here the 970 is actually a bit ahead and previously the 970 was a bit behind a moment ago for example to recap everything the 390 X wasn't a lead of a couple percent pretty small and this Delta between the 973 90 X with the 970 the lead is 11 point two percent at the same resolution just some settings tweaked we haven't yet found the cause of this but I did substantial research with the site's Mike gaglione and we spent a few extra hours of validation trying to figure out what it was I haven't found it yet but the narrowed down list of settings is SSAO global illumination and texture quality and that's what we're researching next so we'll let you guys know if we figure out what's going on with this disparity and it requires for the research so what are the best cards were just cause 3 looking at things from the 1080 range first the 1080 settings with very high play best on a 970 or 3 90 x not too surprising that's fairly common for these games the 970 is a bit better value in this case in terms of frames per dollar it's cheaper these days and the 390 X if you want Andy or you're pushing towards another game where it's advantaged it's not a bad Buy it's just not the best value comparatively at 1080 with high the options I look at would be the r9 380 x sort of at the top end of that it's six percent faster than the gtx 960 on average or the r9 380 which is comparable to the 285 in these charts or the gtx 960 4 gigabyte card if you're planning on playing games that work vram intensive like AC syndicate although that game struggles on the 960 to begin with so those would be by three main options for 1080 and high and then at 1440 are basically looking at a 980 TI or a 980 both of which are very solid performing cards and consistent with 1440 performance but neither which will play 4k very well at this particular point in time with Just Cause 3 so until there's some sort of SLI optimization or other optimization 4k is not super playable on Just Cause 3 right now you can make it work with some settings drops but no one really wants to do that because then you're just blowing up lower settings at a much higher solution although it's not terrible depending on the game but this game I don't like it so that's where I would go for different cards different settings and things like that post and comfortable if you have any questions and check out the full article linked in the description below for more information on Just Cause 3 and the settings and all of that and as always hit that patreon link the postural video thank you for watching I will see you all next time