Gadgetory

four axis games in conjunction we publish a 2k games release the heavily anticipated XCOM - last Friday February 5th XCOM - is a turn-based tactical video game and unlike most titles we come across it's a PC exclusive game being solely distributed through Steam it's an okapi PC port here you can expect smooth sailing and a well optimized experience free of bugs ah not so much so far XCOM - has been unfortunately plagued with random crashes startup problems performance issues than other general errors currently the steam discussions board is full of gamers complaining about all these issues and for my own testing I've run into a few crashes though performance overall seems quite good having said that there are few oddities here framerate seemed to jump around pretty wildly but not in the way they do in save rise to the Tomb Raider strangely the cutscenes are frame capped even with facing disabled and with rocky gtx 980ti some are even locked at 30fps therefore we avoided these completely when benchmarking thankfully those the over-the-shoulder camera scenes that are features throughout the game aren't frame caps the first mission of the single-player campaign was used for testing titled sabotage Advent Monument the test runs for 120 seconds and in that time we get a good mix of different scenes we decided to use the maximum in-game quality settings with FXAA selected in favor of MSAA times 8 this offers a better balance of performance and image quality at 1440p with a gtx 980ti using the maximum quality settings the cutscenes don't even maintain a 30 FPS average and often hover in the low 20s granted these teams do force MSAA times aid the performance is still shocking on such a high-end graphics card I mean let's be honest this isn't a visually stunning game that is what the XCOM games are about finally benchmarking takes place at the standard resolutions we always test that being 1080p 1440p and 4k the performance at 1080p isn't bad considering the games maxed out although that said when compared to other games I've tested recently I'm not sure the visuals can even be compared the Ono 380 and GTX 960 are not able to deliver an average of 60 fps and rather an r9 390 s required which I must say is very surprising beyond that the rest of the field average well over 60 fps with the GTX 970 and 993 90 X never dipping below 60 fps jumping up to 1440p crashes the r9 380 and gtx 960 as both averages 26 fps and would drop down to 22 FPS at certain times only the gtx 980ti was able to break the 60 FPS barrier though it would drop down to low 50s at times - unbelievably as a 4k results show almost the same performance we saw when testing these cards and rise of the Tomb Raider those wanting to play X come to at 4k will either require insane GPU firepower will have to be content with heavily reducing the quality settings honestly I'm pretty shocked by how demanding XCOM 2 is I hate to throw around buzz phrases like not optimized or poorly coded but given the performance numbers we've just seen coupled with a relatively unimpressive graphics it's hard to draw any other conclusion not just that but the game's horrible stability really makes you question his current condition and that's really a shame for a piece of the only title initially I plan to include a heap of image quality comparisons and more in-depth testing using a range of presets but given the game's current state I felt was best to wait until the games have been patched to fix the various bugs and performance issues if I'm honest XCOM - isn't really my type of game so I won't comment too much on the gameplay however it seems like the games does at least deliver when it comes to this aspect as its received overwhelmingly positive reviews from both professional reviewers and gamers alike thanks for tuning into Hardware on box for another game performance video I'm your host Matt and I'd love to hear what you think on our forum a hardware on box com don't forget to hit like and hit subscribe and I'll see you guys next time yeah