Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)

id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.

Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.

The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.

Wolfenstein II - 2560x1440 -

Wolfenstein II - 1920x1080 -

Wolfenstein II - 99th Percentile - 2560x1440 -

Wolfenstein II - 99th Percentile - 1920x1080 -

As we've seen before, Turing and Vega tend to run well on Wolfenstein II. For our games, these results are actually the closest the RX 590 can get to the GTX 1660 Ti, and even here the GTX 1660 Ti is a solid 13-14% ahead. Here, the GTX 1660 Ti also pulls the biggest lead over the GTX 1060 6GB, coming in at more than 1.5X faster, but also loses to the RX Vega 56 by more than other games.

The 6GB of framebuffer doesn't seem to be holding the GTX 1660 Ti back. The GTX 960's 2GB framebuffer, on the other hand, is asphyxiating.

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  • Rudde - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Never mind, the second page explains this well. (Parallell execution of fp16, fp32 and int32)
  • CiccioB - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    Not only that.
    With Turing you also get mesh shading and a better support for thread switching, which is a awful technique used on GCN to improve its terrible efficiency, having lots of "bubbles" in the pipelines.
    That's the reason you see previous AMD optimized games that didn't run too well with Pascal work much better with Turing, as the high threaded technique (the famous AC which is a bit overused in engines created for the console HW) is not going to constantly stall the SM with useless work as that of frequent task switching.
  • AciMars - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    “Worse yet, the space used per SM has gotten worse“. not true.. you know, turing have separate cuda cores for int and fp. It means when turing have 1536 cuda cores means 1536 int + 1536 fp cores. So on die size actually turing have 2x cuda cores compare to pascal
  • CiccioB - Monday, February 25, 2019 - link

    Not exactly, the number of CUDA core are the same, just that a new independent ALU as been added.
    A CUDA core is not only an execution unit, it also registers, memory (cache), buses (memory access) and other special execution units (load/store).
    By adding a new integer ALU you don't automatically get double the capacity as really doubling the number of a complete CUDA core.
  • ballsystemlord - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    Here are some spelling and grammar corrections.

    This has proven to be one of NVIDIA's bigger advantages over AMD, an continues to allow them to get away with less memory bandwidth than we'd otherwise expect some of their GPUs to need.
    Missing d as in "and":
    This has proven to be one of NVIDIA's bigger advantages over AMD, and continues to allow them to get away with less memory bandwidth than we'd otherwise expect some of their GPUs to need.
    so we've only seen a handful of games implement (such as Wolfenstein II) implement it thus far.
    Double implement, 1 befor ()s and 1 after:
    so we've only seen a handful of games (such as Wolfenstein II) implement it thus far.

    For our games, these results is actually the closest the RX 590 can get to the GTX 1660 Ti,
    Use "are" not "is":
    For our games, these results are actually the closest the RX 590 can get to the GTX 1660 Ti,

    This test offers a slew of additional tests - many of which use behind the scenes or in our earlier architectural analysis - but for now we'll stick to simple pixel and texel fillrates.
    Missing "we" (I suspect that the sentence should be reconstructed without the "-"s, but I'm not that good.):
    This test offers a slew of additional tests - many of which we use behind the scenes or in our earlier architectural analysis - but for now we'll stick to simple pixel and texel fillrates.

    "Looking at temperatures, there are no big surprises here. EVGA seems to have tuned their card for cooling, and as a result the large, 2.75-slot card reports some of the lowest numbers in our charts, including a 67C under FurMark when the card is capped at the reference spec GTX 1660 Ti's 120W limit."
    I think this could be clarified as their are 2 EVGA cards in the charts and the one at 67C is not explicitly labeled as EVGA.

    Thanks
  • Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    Thanks!
  • boozed - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    The model numbers have become quite confusing
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    I don't think they are confusing, 16 is between 10 and 20, plus the RTX is extra differentiation. In fact if NVIDIA had some cards in the 20 series with RTX capability and some cards in 20 series without RTX capability, even if some were 'GTX' and some were 'RTX', then that would be far more confusing. Putting the non-RTX Turing cards in their own series is a way of avoiding confusion. But if they actually come out with an "1180" as say some rumors floating around, that would be very confusing.
  • haukionkannel - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link

    Interesting to see the next year.
    Rtx 3050 and gtx 2650ti for the weaker version, if we get one new card rtx family... Hmm... that could work if They keep the naming. 2021 RTX3040 and gtx 2640ti...
  • CiccioB - Thursday, February 28, 2019 - link

    Next generation all cards will have enough RT and tensor core enabled.

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