Gadgetory

hey everyone i am steve from gamers nexus tonight and we have a huge amount of video cards on the table right now because i just got done doing a GPU benchmark of The Witcher 3 and I worked on this from about 7 p.m. on Monday through 9:00 a.m. on launch day and the reason it took so long is because we're very careful with our methodology to make sure that the results are accurate and that the representative of real world in-game use part of this includes developing a custom in-game benchmark where we look for various objects in the game that reflect the game settings so there's a lot of settings in game water quality grass density things like that chromatic aberration and I try to include those different elements of gameplay to ensure that it is actually reflected in the benchmark we also do multiple task passes to eliminate outliers and then average the results and further I collect data on average FPS one percent level fps and 0.1% low FPS the percentages are basically the 99th and 99.9% I'll frame rate results within our 30 second testing period and these represent dips and stuttering and very jarring experiences to the user so these are important numbers that can show when the game will noticeably stutter while you're playing it and it creates sort of a hiccup in the environment where it looks like the game briefly hangs on to a frame a little bit longer than it should so that's one of the things we're collecting data on in these results The Witcher 3 has a lot of settings that aren't normally named in games so there are some new settings here and it's not quite as complex as GTA 5's very deep settings but definitely worth going over them briefly and I'll have a full optimization guide online after this for a brief overview of the settings present a few of the unknown ones are in the post-processing effects tab and these would include things like chromatic aberration which is a photography term and it applies to The Witcher 3 you can enable it or disable it quite simply and chromatic aberration is an effect that exists in photography that is resultant of the lens and how it interacts with the light it's when the lens has difficulty getting the color correct and focusing on a certain color wavelength when you're shooting a photo so in the game this will be present mostly when looking at light coming through windows or light Maryna around objects due to various types of backlighting and that creates a sort of glow around the object and it makes it look a little less in focus and this is actually intentional it creates a cinematic effect this isn't something you would really see in the real world it's not something you see without a lens for the most part so it is definitely more cinematic and less realistic in that instance but you can enable or disable it does not have a huge frame rate impact from what I've seen so far but I haven't finalized those tests there are also things like vignette even getting creates a soft shadow around the center of whatever is in focus so it creates a darkness around the focused object and then you've got depth of field which we've discussed before DOF is another photographic term it creates a level of depth and layering to your shot where there's a bokeh effect around the subject that's in focus so if I'm in focus right now if we had a lens with better depth of field on this camera this wall would be more blurred out these video cards might be partially blurred out and then I would be the most in focus so that gives you an idea of what happens and this is visible in the game as well and in gta5 Blum is another one this one has been around for quite a while made a big showing in Far Cry in the past and bloom it creates a shimmering effect around heat or light sources so in The Witcher 3 a good example would be fire if you have an open flame and you have bloom enabled you'll see a slight shimmering over the fire and that's all that really does it's just a filter and all the post-processing effects are applied as a filter atop the already rendered objects models Poly's things like that and it just sort of affects how you view the game through the viewport so to speak of the character in terms of performance The Witcher 3 was actually fairly poorly optimized as you'll see in these charts and it ran not that great on SLI Dedes on a Titan X all the way down the range definitely does not run too well on AMD right now note that for these tests we had the newest Nvidia drivers and we tried to use the beta AMD drivers which are still ancient so to speak in terms of drivers they go back to GTA 5 or before that even so the latest AMD drivers are not optimized for the witcher 3 and filming there are not new drivers that are built for the witcher 3 so these charts the numbers will change when AMD does actually optimize their drivers for the game to this end when trying to use the 15.4 drivers the beta ones we found that there were issues detecting some cards there were other issues with crashing and things like that I had to roll back to the most recent stable drivers which are very old I think they're December and that's just because AMD hasn't updated in quite a while I likely do the new video cards coming out soon and that will probably get the biggest push but NVIDIA had game ready drivers so you will see a performance boost there some Nvidia users on the 700 series of last generation cards and noted that they were able to eliminate crashing by rolling back to the previous GTA 5 drivers rather than using The Witcher ones let's talk about the benchmarks already so at 4k to sli gtx 980 s are barely able to run the game at a playable fps there about 10 FPS below where i would want them to be ideally you sit at 60 and then a titan ax is a little bit worse than those this is known that the 1980s outperform a tight next in most games when an SLI and that's just because the 12 gigabytes of video memory doesn't do as much for you as the added processing power of an additional video card dropping down the medium settings gets a bit more playable but it's still a little rough playing the game at 4k with any graphics configuration then we look at 1440p you'll notice the 290x is not present on the 1440p benchmarks and this is because of an issue with the witcher 3 it's a weird bug where 1440p does not appear as available for the gtx 980 single or for the r9 290x just some of them i was able to force the 980 to appear by building an SLI configuration and then disabling sli so it's not really a realistic approach no one would actually do that but I was able to sort of hack a 1440 availability and the menus by doing that I could not get 1440 to appear as an option for the 290x might be able to hack at 3 game configuration file but I haven't tried yet but I do have a suspicion that as possible as you see here a single GTX 980 doesn't do too poorly and the r9 285 is sort of just on the border of playability depending on if you're a medium or ultra and then dropping down to 1080p this is where thing get interesting 1080p with ultra the 980 can barely push 60fps average and that's the average frame rate that's a very expensive video card to play 1080p ultra the game looks good I don't know that it looked that good but that's really not that's up for you to decide that's a subjective thing but when we look past the 980 the 1% low and 0.1% low FPS that are telling you about our tanked by the graphics settings you can see that some of these cards the 980 included are getting 14 17 fps for the loads and this means that you're getting very noticeable as a user jarring when you're playing the game so you'll get a stutter every now and then each of these tests is 30 seconds long and I repeated them several times within that 30 seconds I would notice the stuttering at least once so that is definitely a noticeable issue and this is where the witcher 3 is poorly optimized as i called it because in most of the games we benchmark there's not such a huge 3 or 4x disparity between the 1% lows and the rest of the frame rates the 90 the rest of the 99% of the frame rates the 290x enters playable range when we go down to 1080p medium it's well within playable range of 75 FPS unfortunately I do not have a 280 X or GTX 970 trying to get a 970 and trying to get a 280 X but we haven't been able to get one from AMD so that is not on these charts the GTX 970 would be playable at 1080p medium judging by our other performance of video cards in this spectrum the GTX 960 is for example are in the 50 FPS range and you'll see that there is not a huge difference between 2 and 4 gigabytes for these cards but if you're curious how two versus 4 gigabytes actually impacts performance in other games gtx 960 i do have a video for that on the channel and finally here's the low chart the witcher 3 is really not that well optimized you need very high-end hardware to get a good framerate we're getting a lot of comments on the website that are talking about how people are getting a good average FPS and they don't know why we're calling it poorly authorized the reason is you need to measure the 1% lows and point 1% lows to see where the framerate actually does tank it's a little less noticeable it is noticeable and it does require certain scenes in the game when the game starts going more hectic with post-processing effect like bloom and aberration and you have a high amount of polyester on to the screen you're making more draw calls because there's more complex geometry on the screen this is when the frame rate will really tank and when you'll notice those dips a lot more so it does take a certain type of testing to to voke these failures so that is all for our Witcher 3 benchmark if you like our journalistic approach to things and my efforts to keep everything objective and eliminate a lot of the marketing heavy stuff on YouTube and some websites then please consider looking into our patreon campaign this 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