Gadgetory

ultralight displays have grown tremendously in popularity over the past year and it's for good reason they're 21 by 9 aspect ratio allows more peripheral vision and immersion for games that support it and not all do and we decided to benchmark GPU performance on one of the high-end ultra wide displays at 34 40 by 1440 so not 1440p which is 2560 by 1440 but a bit higher resolution still than that we deployed our mid to high end GPUs for this test from Nvidia that's the gtx 960 and up 4 gigabytes and from AMD that's the r9 285 and up which is a bit dated now but comparable to the 380 and above that we have the 380 X resolution was set to 34 40 by 1440 on the Acer predator ultra wide which is a 34 inch curved g-sync enabled display but we had g-sync disabled for all tests as were several other game graphics technologies that may have benefited one manufacturer or the other and you can check our test methodology links in the description below for more information on that well reviewing the monitor separately in a future video and it is among the best I've used but today's focus is on FPS benchmarks at 34 40 by 1440 resolution some ultra whites run lower resolutions like 2560 by 1080 but we're going for the proper tests on the high end here the pixel count of our 34 40 by 1440 resolution display is 4.9 million to provide some perspective though that's a pretty fair gain there would be 2 million pixel count of 1080p or 1920 x 1080 pixels and 1440 which is 2560 x 1440 runs 3.7 million pixels so the 34 40 by 1440 is actually higher than 1440p and that means that anything you can't run at 1440p definitely can't run on this 21 by 9 1440 resolution without some serious tweaks in the game settings or ini files today's test featured dirt rally shadow of mordor call of duty black ops 3 GTA 5 and fallout 4 we've got a couple other titles too like The Witcher 3 not all of them are in this video but whatever's not is in the description below in the article with all the charts as usual some games are not yet supported on ultra whites and some may never be because of competitive reasons so these games like dirty bomb which is one kind of a new game that's not complete and - it is competitive do not necessarily support ultra wide displays like 34 40 by 14 14 that's either competitive or just any developers not supporting it so do keep that in mind all the games we tested for this benchmark are properly supported for ultra wide resolutions except shadow of mordor which is a bit odd because it slightly stretches the character and it's I think it's 33 60 by 1440 definitely an odd resolution but that's the only outlier here all the rest are the full native resolution first up is dirt rally which fits the ultra wide bill exceedingly well the resolution is fully supported and added screen space does increase viewable terrain corners and neighboring vehicles all advantageous to immersion or just keeping tabs on the race dirt rally is generally playable above 30fps you get a good enough experience though we'd like to target 40 to 45 for a smoother gaming experience obviously 60 is still that sort of magic number for fluidity but it isn't at all required in this type of game unlike a competitive fps in dirt rally anything above the r9 380 X and including the 380 X is generally playable in this chart the 1% and 0.1% load dips on the GTX 960 are bad enough that this resolution with ultra settings is fairly unplayable but you could dip the settings down to medium or even a mix of medium and high to make the gtx 960 playable with the ultra wide resolution in dirt rally as for ultra settings though the gtx 980ti outperforms the 980 by 22.3% which then outperforms the 390 x by 0.9 percent but the GTX 980 s low frame times are significantly more tightly timed than the r9 390x which falls near 30fps for 0.1% low the GTX 970 is outperformed by the r9 390x by 8.7 1% the game is fairly playable on even mid-range cards if dropping settings below ultra the 2 gigabyte r9 285 has the worst 0.1% frame times to the point that the frame drops become noticeable during gameplay it's a bit of a stutter this is partly a VRAM limitation with the high resolutions but mostly a processing limitation of the older 285 black ops 3 is the type of game where you really want those higher frame rates to best compete and luckily it's also the best optimized title on the entire bench though VRAM is a bit of a different question sli performance is actually worthwhile for black ops one of the rare occasions that is the case and it nearly doubles single GPU performance in this instance 1% and 0.1% low frame times also spike hard with SLI and that's another rare occurrence so everything's very tightly timed with SLI in this configuration everything from the GTX 970 and up is capable of hitting 60fps averages or above with high settings at this resolution jumping to extra is a bit more abusive on the GPU particularly vram and that's something we've discussed previously in our black ops 3 graphics optimization guide we search for that you'll find our video talking about why that happens the 980ti outperforms the 390 X by 13.3% the 390x outperforms the 980 again that's the 980 by five point three percent which outperforms the 970 by eleven point five nine percent the 390x often trades blows with the 970 and 980 but it really depends heavily on optimization and resolution and AMD can pull ahead a bit at high resolutions given the architectures ability to process raw raw pixel throughput a bit more efficiently GTA 5 at Ultra shows the SLI configuration as the only solution to frame times greater than 60 FPS though it's not necessarily a good value AMD however seems to have severe frame drop issues with GTA 5 on its newest driver update something that will soon be talking to the company about these are bad enough that you'll see a hard stop in gameplay for a split second not long but enough to interrupt play this is a specific issue with GTA 5 and is visible not just to the ultra wide resolutions but other resolutions as well the nihti is somewhat playable but let's move down the high settings before having a better look on high settings across the board everything from the r9 380 X and up would generally be playable but the 0.1% frame times are pretty awful right now for AMD on the GTA 5 benchmark that pushes us into 970 territory currently with the current drivers and that is pretty well student for play at this graphics quality The Witcher 3 is easily one of the best looking games of 2015 and it hasn't aged a year and it's one year since launch at Ultra the games a bit abusive on GPUs but reasonably playable on a 980ti keep in mind that we had hair works completely disabled during these tests and it used SSAO instead of HB AO both which are Nvidia Advantage technologies dropping a few runs down to medium allows better playability with anything from a 970 and up being fairly smooth the 970 is beaten out though by the 390 X and the 390 X does suffer from worse low frame times than both the 1979-80 so there's another trade off there as seems to be the case with AMD right now we tested a lot of other configurations - like fallout 4 shadow of Mordor and Just Cause 3 you can check the link in the description below to see our results on those games so what's the answer then well it depends on what you're trying to do a lot of games can actually be supported on 34:40 by 1440 with lower end graphics cards like the 960 and 380 X but it just depends on what type of games dirt rally or any third game and the total war games are good examples of titles that you can actually play at this high resolution as long as you're willing to sacrifice some of your game quality if you dip down to medium or even in some cases low media mix or medium high mix so if you're willing to do that you're willing to tune your settings and sacrifice some of that fidelity visually in exchange for a higher resolution and a wider experience it's more than just a high resolution in this instance then you can play on mid-range cards now why you would buy something like a $1200 ultra wide when you have a 960 I don't know I probably wouldn't suggest that but it is possible if you found yourself in that situation as for the higher-end titles if you want it to stick to games like The Witcher 3 or just generally push ultra or high settings at a minimum then you can generally get away with a 970 and a 390 x1 or the other in some instances The Witcher 3 included it's hard to hit 60fps even with a 970 and even with a 980 TI in that specific use case so there are definitely still titles that push these cards a bit too hard for the high resolution to retain those maximize settings but you can do all kinds of tuning to drop the settings down ways that you won't notice too much as a user and still be able to get a good experience on a 21 by 9 much wider display than you're used to with the normal 16 by 9 aspect ratio so there's a lot that can be done and perhaps contrary to popular belief it is possible to play on these larger resolution displays these ultra wide with mid-range hardware just you do have to note that low frame times can be an issue in some games like the drops and that is a game-by-game case you can see in our benchmarks and then of course just sacrificing game settings is another scenario that you may have to endure and games like GTA 5 The Witcher 3 and titles like that are going to be a bit too abusive for even low settings of the high resolutions so I have one question signing off here for you all if you could leave an answer in the comments that would be fantastic I'm curious about what you would rather do if you have only one of two options there's no middle-of-the-road option here so option one if you have a high resolution display and say a mid-range card would you rather play the higher resolution with slightly lower settings or would you rather play a lower resolution like 1080p which is not that low and higher settings so what do you value more the visual fidelity of models and textures and things like that or do you value more the visual fidelity of just a higher resolution or a wider peripheral vision in your gaming experience let us know in the comments below thank you for watching as always hit the patreon link the petrel video helps out directly and linked in the description if you want to hit the article with all the full benchmarks and charts and I will see you all next time