Wolfenstein: Youngblood Performance Review

The FPS Review may receive a commission if you purchase something after clicking a link in this article.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood 4K Performance

For Wolfenstein: Youngblood we are performing a manual run-through at the beginning of the “Riverside” mission.  There is intense firefights, lighting, fires, explosions, particles, and graphics with plenty of NPCs as we blow through them all.

For our third round of Wolfenstein: Youngblood performance comparisons, we are testing this game at 3840×2160 which is 4K.  We have the game set to the “Mein Leben!” Graphics Preset which is the highest in-game settings.  NVIDIA Adaptive Shading is on the default “Balanced” mode and ASYNC Compute is turned on for every video card.

On this graph, we have the performance shown from fastest to slowest video card.  Now things are very interesting at 4K, and we have a lot more to talk about.  First and foremost, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti clearly offers the best gaming experience at 4K with 86 FPS.  This video card kept framerates high and they never dropped lower than 60FPS while gaming at 4K for us.  Next up, the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER did quite well also averaging 73 FPS.  Though the minimums did drop into the lower 50’s. 

Next, we come to the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER and Radeon VII.  Both of these video cards are actually playable at 4K!  The GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER is 9% faster and is the better video card overall.  However, the Radeon VII is still in that playable ballpark.  It did drop into the ’40s at intense times, however.

Below the Radeon VII is starting to get a bit iffier.  Though the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and Radeon RX 5700 XT show average framerates in the mid 50’s it’s the minimums where it can get a bit too low at times.  Do note how close the Radeon RX 5700 XT is to the RTX 2060 SUPER though, the RTX 2060 SUPER is only 3% faster.  Performance has really narrowed here.  However, with both of these video cards as we said the minimums are hitting a little too low.  To fix that lowering the game to “Uber” quality instead of “Mein Leben!” will fix that right up.

Now we come to the really interesting bit, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 is a lot faster than the GeForce RTX 2060, with the RTX 2060 performance taking a major dive.  There is a reason for this, and that reason is VRAM capacity.  You see, original release GeForce RTX 2060 has 6GB of VRAM while Radeon RX 5700 has 8GB of VRAM.  Quite simply the RTX 2060 with 6GB of VRAM is hitting a major VRAM bottleneck at 4K with “Mein Leben!” settings.  With more memory, the Radeon RX 5700 doesn’t hit this wall.  In turn, it means Radeon RX 5700 is 40% faster than RTX 2060 simply because it has more VRAM.

Even though the Radeon RX 5700 performs better because it has more VRAM, it still isn’t playable at “Mein Leben!.”  The performance level is still too slow, the GPU just can’t handle the resolution well here.  In order to make the Radeon RX 5700 playable at 4K, we’d have to lower it to the “Medium” graphics preset.  With the GeForce RTX 2060, we have to lower it to “Low.”  Quite frankly, these cards are not the cards you want for 4K gaming anyway.

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

Recent News