Wolfenstein: Youngblood Performance Review

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Conclusion

1080p

We experienced great performance at the highest setting of “Mein Leben!” on all video cards tested at 1080p.  Even the slowest of them, the Radeon RX 5700 still had performance that was in the upper 90’s of framerate.  All eight video cards were playable at the highest in-game settings at 1080p here, no exceptions.  The Radeon RX 5700 may have been the slowest, but at 1080p it’s all you really need for this game. 

1440p

At 1440p we continue to see all eight video cards perform incredibly well.  It’s no joke when we say that even at 1440p at “Mein Leben!” all eight video cards are playable at the highest in-game settings.  The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 SUPER will give you over 100 FPS.  However, even the Radeon RX 5700 will provide an average in the ’70s with lows in the 50’s.  If you absolutely have to maintain above 60 FPS at all times, then the Radeon RX 5700 XT is a good deal or the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER.  Both video cards give you a great 1440p experience.

4K

It is only at 4K that we start to see a major separation between what is playable and not playable at “Mein Leben!” settings.  For 4K nothing beats the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti of course, but you don’t really need it to enjoy a 4K experience.  The new GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER provides just as good of an experience at 4K in this game at the highest in-game settings. 

If you can sacrifice a little minimum framerate the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER is a great alternative for 4K gaming.  Otherwise, every video card below that you are probably going to find yourself dropping to either “Uber” or “Ultra” game settings at 4K.  On the lower-end cards like the Radeon RX 5700 series or RTX 2060, those are not really going to cut it for 4K here. 

We did find at 4K you definitely want a video card that has at least 8GB of VRAM, 6GB is not going to cut it for 4K gaming.  It seems at 1080p 6GB will work just fine for VRAM capacity, but once you get up to 1440p you’ll want 8GB at this point for the smoothest gameplay.  It’s absolutely required at 4K.

Other Features

This game supports NVIDIA Adaptive Shading.  In our experience, we feel it is best to just leave it at the “Balanced” setting.  That seems to perform almost as well as the “Performance” mode, and with better quality.  That will give you a few percent better performance.  This is more important on lower-end video cards that might struggle with performance.  Otherwise, on high-end video cards, you can turn this feature “Off” if you want bare none the best image quality with no sacrifices.  Though in our testing we noticed no difference in image quality between “Balanced” and “Off.” 

You should also leave this game on its highest supported AA setting.  It will not harm performance, there is no reason to use a lesser AA setting for performance gains.  You should also leave ASYNC Compute on “Adaptive” as this doesn’t really impact performance, at least on our system.

If you want to play with “Uber” Image Streaming be sure to use a video card that has over 8GB of VRAM else the game will be choppy.  This is because it will use well over 8GB of VRAM when you have this enabled.      

Final Points

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is out on the PC.  While this game is certainly not a smash hit with critics or users, one thing is for sure, the graphics are beautiful and you can’t complain about the performance.  Mechanics and storyline aside, the Wolfenstein series has always done well by utilizing id Tech for the game engine.  Based on id Tech 6 Wolfenstein: Youngblood is no different.  It successfully utilizes the Vulkan API to perform really well across video cards from low-end to high-end, and it looks good doing it.  No video card really stands out here as this game performs very well across the board. 

If you are gaming at 1080p you don’t need an expensive video card to enjoy this game, something like a Radeon RX 5700 will do fine.  At 1440p bumping up to the Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER will give you a great experience.  At 4K, the new GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER seems to be the sweet spot.

Discussion

Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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