Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox for another episode of what does it take to play where I take a PC game and work out which combination of hardware offers gamers the best bang for their buck this time around I am checking out player unknowns battlegrounds and this is a title a lot of you have heavily requested for the past few weeks now also yes I am still sick I was really hoping to have recovered by now but what can you do anyway rather than go the rest of the week without a video I've loaded up on Cod rules and hopefully I make it to the end of this video technically the game isn't officially released yet but you can pay $30 u.s. to basically become a beta tester for the developer the early access became available in the 24th of March 2017 and a shipload of gamers have taken them up on the offer to try the game out by mid April 2017 the game had already sold over 1 million copies and Steam reported a peak concurrent play account of 89 thousand the game's estimated to have exceeded 34 million dollars u.s. in sales for April making it one of the top 10 highest-grossing revenue games for the month exceeding the likes of overwatch and Counter Strike global Offensive for example last month the game exceeded 2 million copies sold and has now grossed over 60 million dollars so why is battle grounds so popular basically I think it boils down to the game's fast-paced nature firstly getting into a game is extremely quick despite featuring up to 100 players games generally take less than a minute to find and even if you die quickly getting into another game won't take that long once you are in a game the action is generally quite fast paced thanks to the continual shrinkage of the safe zone which herds players closer and closer together anyway there's a lot more to the game but I won't touch on that here instead I'm going to focus on the hardware required for optimal gameplay at sandy P as you might expect battlegrounds isn't particularly well optimised right now and the game's Polish leaves a lot to be desired so pretty typical stuff there for an early access title still the game is a heap of fun and there seems to be quite a few of you wanting to know what kind of hardware you need in order to enjoy the game using reasonably high quality settings so over the past week I've been messing around with a few CPU and GPU combinations to try and work out which delivers players the best bang for their buck right now in video GPUs appear to have a rather large performance advantage in this title over their radio and competition that said AMD's rise in CPUs are performing very well and I found the horizon 7 1800 X to be roughly on par with a core i7 7700 K when testing CPU performance there I found something rather unexpected with the 7700 K there always seemed to be one thread that was heavily taxed meanwhile core distribution when using a rise in CPU was much more even this allowed the rise in v 1400 to deliver very smooth performance really did CPU utilization exceed 40% for rendering around 60 to 80 FPS at 1080p using the high quality preset I found the geforce gtx 1066 gigabyte was the way to go the RX 580 on the other hand would at times drop as low as 40 FPS under the same conditions AMD could very well be waiting for the game to be released before they invest too much time and driver development that said though given the game's popularity it might make sense to start optimizing now for testing i have mostly stuck with the high quality preset as it offers the best balance of visual quality and performance in my opinion and here's a quick look at how the various presets compare using the gtx 1060 at 1080p as you can see there's a decent 30 percent performance increase in framerate when going from ultra to high and most crucially this saw the average frame rate hovering around 60 FPS downgrading from high to medium only boosted performance by 13% and in my opinion the difference in visual quality was quite noticeable then as we move to low the frame rate does skyrocket but in my opinion the game looks pretty awful that said though with less vegetation and distractions I can see why more serious gamers use the lower quality settings so moving forward I will be showing 1080p footage using the high and ultra quality presets what's the other isin 514 hundred and gtx 1060 yet on play unknowns battlegrounds is a heap of fun but at the same time it feels like being a long way from a finished product the early access have seen a number of updates already but still even so I fear will be quite some time before the games anywhere new Polish enough to exit the early access stage even so most gamers seem happy with what they're seeing so far based on the Steam reviews so hopefully developer will keep moving forward at a satisfactory rate for now being a better access tester can be frustrating especially for those trying to learn the game I found quite a few times I just couldn't kill some people even when I came across someone afk it was quite challenging probably shouldn't admit that here's one example I'm speaking of for a relatively close distance I take a shot at a stationary target who's clearly not wearing any armor the first round 5 looked like a solid headshot density animation suggested otherwise two more rounds seemed to be on target but how they missed I get it I'm not that good so I advanced within spitting distance and fired off two more rounds both in my opinion probably should have hit that neither did so I gave up on headshots and move to execution distance standing for center mass shots two more rounds and I've got the job done and my second kill in the bag not sure I should count that one but anyway I was quite desperate so I did and moved on anyway if you can deal with the frustration of often missing what looks to be a sure kill only to be denied by shotgun from like a hundred metres away then battlegrounds will provide hours of fun sadly I just don't have time to act as a paid beta tester so revisit the title once it's finished I'm your host Steve see again next time you guys