NVIDIA Benchmarks
There’s quite a bit of controversy surrounding the graphical prowess and capabilities of the engine within Fallout 4. Immediately when the E3 trailer surfaced this year comparisons were quickly made to Fallout 3, and they initially weren’t favorable. Aside from an obvious widening of the color palette, the actual fidelity seemed to remain largely the same. Texture resolution, AA quality and anistropy quality were very similar with particle effects, shadows and lighting being strikingly similar in design and implementation that were seen in the Gamebryo that Fallout 3 was developed on. In reality, however, the underlying engine powering Fallout 4 shares few similarities with the aging Gamebryo, and is actually an evolved variant of the Creation Engine that was designed in-house and first used in Skyrim.
Despite being updated with more modern AA, a new particle engine, better tree rendering, new physically based deferred rendering and more advanced real-time shadow map rendering, criticism still persists around how it looks.
GameWorks might have been implemented correctly in Fallout 4. But will that be enough for discerning fans?
Inside you’ll see all manner of rendering technologies such as tiled deferred lighting, screen space reflections, bokeh depth of field, height fog, filmic tonemapping, dynamic dismemberment using hardware tessellation and a novel volumetric lighting technique that’s referred to as God Rays, which makes heavy use of hardware tessellation. It’s this last one that’s NVIDIA partnered and the main inclusion from their GameWorks.
GameWorks making that limited appearance in Fallout 4 has lead to a rash of criticism from gaming enthusiasts who prefer open graphics techniques and technologies or perhaps even integrating a well-implemented and optimized version of GameWorks so as to not detract from performance from either major vendors GPU’s. Batman Arkham Knight, initially The Wither 3, Assassin’s Creed Unity and several others have soured the taste of GameWorks for most, so it’s within reason to expect a negative reaction to its inclusion. But NVIDIA has been listening to feedback and criticism, and in the right hands, the GameWorks code for various effects can be optimized and implemented without much of a negative performance detriment while increasing visual fidelity appreciably. And Bethesda assures us that it’s well optimized and that those God Rays won’t cause poor performance.
In this, we'll look at AMD and NVIDIA's performance separately, looking at how certain controversial settings perform. Then we'll see what Fallout 4 does in regards to other system resource usage. Let's begin, shall we?
Testing Procedure
For testing we used FRAPS to record 60 seconds of gameplay as we make our way from the Red Rocket gas station down to Concord, the first town you’ll inevitably run into. The time of day is in the late afternoon, so there are certainly going to be examples of volumetric lighting to stress the cards.
We test a multitude of cards in our test bench at 1080P and 1440P with God Rays on Ultra, High and then with them off. TAA was the anti-aliasing method used and anisotropic filtering was set to x16. Bokeh depth of field was used and ambient occlusion was set to SSAO (high). Additional rendering features such as screen space reflections, wetness, rain occlusion, motion blur and lens flare were also enabled.
Test Bench
| Component | Selection |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-6600K |
| Motherboard | ASRock Z170 Extreme 4 |
| Power Supply | EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 G2 |
| SDD | SanDisk Extreme II 120GB |
| Storage Disk | Seagate 2TB |
| Memory | 16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4 2400 |
| Monitor | Dell P2715Q |
| Video Cards | AMD R9 Fury, AMD R9 Nano, AMD R7 370, GeForce GTX Titan X, GeForce GTX 980, GeForce GTX 960 |
| Operating System | Window 10 64-Bit |
| Drivers | NVIDIA - 358.91 AMD - 15.11 Beta |
Thank you to ASRock for lending us the Z170 Extreme 4 for our test bench.
For this test we've replaced the GTX 980 (which was only borrowed anyway) with a GTX 970 to further represent a wider price range of NVIDIA cards. For our graphs, we'll show how each card performs with the different levels of God Rays enabled in an attempt to determine whether or not they play a significant role in performance when they're rendered at an average rate.
First lets look at all the settings on their highest and look at all the various AMD and NVIDIA cards together at 1440P, then we'll look at them separately.
1440P
Well, there it is, that's how everything performs against one another. But let's delve a little deeper into what God Rays do to performance for each card.
Right away we can see that God Rays do have an effect, though it seems to be rather slight. Granted, this scene isn't inundated with them as a radiation storm or immense amounts of fog might be, but this is a typical scene in that it has an average amount of volumetric lighting. It's a good showing thus far, and it seems to be somewhat well optimized. Let's take a look at the rest of the AMD family, and then the NVIDIA family.
AMD Radeon R9 Nano
AMD Radeon R9 290X
AMD Radeon R7 370
All in all the performance is great. It's stable and runs without significant slow-downs or stuttering on any of the cards. 1440P is quite the stretch for the R7 370, but then it isn't recommended at that resolution anyway. 1080P is where it does quite well, and does so strongly.
God Rays have a very insignificant impact during an average scene, with only a 13% decrease in average performance when set to Ultra on the Fury at 1080P and as much as an 18% detriment in performance on the R7 370, which is due to having fewer CU's to offload tessellation specific tasks to. That isn't nearly as large a gap as expected.
Now let's look at how Fallout 4 performs on NVIDIA hardware.
NVIDIA GTX Titan X
The Titan X is performing quite strongly here, and is able to provide a very fast and efficient experience. God Rays similarly have very little effect on overall performance with only an 8% decrease as a result of turning them to Ultra. The Titan X is fast and well suited to this engine.
NVIDIA GTX 970
NVIDIA GTX 960
The GTX 960 does well at 1080P with a more than acceptable experience. God Rays don't reduce the performance by that many frames, though it does represent a ~20% decrease in average framerate overall. The 970 does surprisingly well here, being competitive with the Fury and certainly more than enough even compared to the Titan X.
We also tested system memory and VRAM usage to get an idea as to how Fallout 4 uses the available resources and whether it over commits or not. CPU usage overall was around 99% on all four cores of the i5-6600K for all cards, running between 98%-100% depending on the complexity of the scene in front of you. Memory usage is important, as we've seen in our recent Black Ops III performance analysis, as it can play a distinct role in how smooth the experience is. If too much memory is being used, then swapping between system RAM and even the HDD can occur, causing some very obvious slowdowns.
Memory Test
The results are remarkable, though certainly in line with Skyrim, the other Creation Engine game that exists. It doesn't over commit on VRAM, nor does it seem to have a memory leak of any kind. RAM usage is stable and there's very little difference between having God Rays on and off.
Conclusion
Fallout 4 has been a very highly anticipated game, one that was full of controversy from the very beginning. When it was announced that GameWorks was going to be included, the assumption was that it was going to perform poorly, or not really at all. There were a few game crashing bugs, but despite those limited circumstances, it ran mostly flawlessly.
The performance itself is also nothing short of stellar on both NVIDIA and AMD. Quite obviously it's faster on NVIDIA cards at the moment, with the Fury not nearly able to compete with the Titan X. But I think that the reason that there's such disparity is due to the relatively unoptimized drivers from AMD. These are a beta driver that, granted, have had attention paid to having Fallout 4 run smoothly, but there is still more work to be done. NVIDIA, on the other-hand, has done well to provide a game ready driver that works well and without many issues.
So perhaps the negative association with GameWorks was premature. And despite the less than ideal performance on the PS4 and the Xbox One, it runs well on the PC. And while it isn't quite the most spectacular looking game to ever grace our PC's, it isn't horridly ugly visually. It's a small evolution of a known engine that's stable. I think that that's a good result. And it's actually quite fun to play as well.
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