Gadgetory

hi and welcome back to hardware unboxed I'm your host Matt and today I'm gonna be taking a look at how the current generation AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards tackle Bethesda's highly anticipated fallout 4 finally fallout 4 is here and fans of the series can begin to roam the big open post-apocalyptic world navigating their way around all through the labyrinth of bloke flyers blood bugs Raiders and all other kinds of nasty stuff but before you're ready to throw yourself into the nuclear fallout a quick look at the recommended system specs is advised the developers put forth some rather demanding hardware requirements especially for the ultra quality settings assuming you're anything like me you want to enjoy fallout 4 and all of its glory and that means cranking the visual settings right up to the max for this Bethesda recommends either a core i7 4790k or FX 95 90 along with a geforce gtx 780 or radeon r9 290x jacks for those of you considering upgrading to a current gen mid-range to high-end graphics card for fallout 4 we've run some benchmarks to show you what kind of performance you can expect the minimum and average frame rate was recorded using fraps at the popular 1080p resolution as well as 1440p and 4k the maximum in-game quality settings were used in each resolution and we selected the temporal anti-aliasing mode otherwise known as taa one thing that does kind of suck about the game is the 60 FPS cap thankfully it can be manually switched off in a config file in my games folder for more information on how to do this please check the video description below benchmarking takes place in the Commonwealth the pre-war American state of Massachusetts in New England the benchmark pass runs for 90 seconds and here's a recording of that very pass we set the difficulty to very easy to avoid being killed by the Raiders and we took the same path each time the results have been taken from an average of three runs finally for a full list of the system specs and software use please refer to the video description below fallout 4 was very playable at 1080p with the GTX 960 which happened to be 11 percent faster than the Radeon r9 380 not something we often find still with an average of 56 frames per second and never dipping below the 46 FPS mark the 3ds still provided a very solid gaming experience especially when keeping in mind the quality settings we were using the sweet spot for optimal performance would have to be the r9 390 and GTX 970 both of which managed to keep the framerate above 60 FPS at all times moving up to 1440p we see that the gtx 960 and r9 380 really struggle and the gameplay was noticeably choppy the gtx 970 and r9 390 provided smooth game players neither drop below the 40 FPS mark and had an average of 56 frames per second the 390x wasn't noticeably faster than 390 and both dip down to the same minimum frame rate at the 1440p resolution an argument could be made that the GTX 980 is the best value graphics card as it sits between the fury and the fury X in terms of performance the 980ti was shockingly fast with an average of 89 fps and a minimum of 81 fps making it 35 % faster than the standard gtx 980 those who want to play a 4k with all the eye-candy turned up will need a 980 TI and even then we still feel like sli is called for as is often the case of the latest triple-a titles 4k gaming will require the use of two or more GPUs visually fallout 4 isn't ridiculously impressive the texture quality and graphical details certainly isn't mind-blowing when compared to other recently released games such as The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt or battlefield hardline that said it is important to remember that fallout 4 is an open game with truly massive environments a lot of variety and when turned all the way up the view distances are truly spectacular on that note if you're looking to gain a little extra performance and for that fall we found one of the biggest performance boosters was to reduce the view and shadow distance to the medium value this alone should net you around 20% more performance depending on the setup unlike black ops 3 we found that fallout 4 wasn't a memory pig and gamers with 8 gig of ram or more would be more than comfortable in fact we didn't see a performance head or any stuttering even when using just 4 gigabytes of RAM but 1080p gaming with everything turned up the GTX 960 is the best budget option while the GTX 970 will deliver the best experience that said the r9 390 provided almost the same result as the GTX 970 so either option will work well at 1080p the performance hit scene when moving up to 1440 Pierre was quite large and we recommend the GeForce GTX 980 here for optimal performance the Radeon r9 390 or GeForce GTX 970 will work quite nicely as well although fallout 4 doesn't feature cutting edge visuals those massive draw distances mean that the 4k resolution demands some serious firepower the 980ti works quite well though a pair of gtx 980 is all fury graphics cards would be required for a completely lag free experience overall fallout 4 looks like a heap of fun and I can't wait to explore more of the open world as always we'll be posting these graphs in a text summary up to f4 my Hardware on box comm if you've got any questions at all then please let me know in the comments and for more videos like this hit like hit subscribe and I'll see you next time yeah