Wolfenstein: Youngblood
For Wolfenstein: Youngblood NVIDIA provided access to a beta patch that takes advantage of the new RT features found in GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs. We don’t know specifically what this entails, but this beta patch will be made public in the game so it is ok to test as everyone will benefit once it is released. We were given special access to an early build of the patch so we can take a look at early performance. This will give you an idea of what to expect.
It should also be noted that there was a bug with the patch which initially did not enable ASYNC Compute on the GeForce RTX 30 Series. However, NVIDIA sent a command line to make sure it was enabled in our testing. We tested with and without this command line. We can report that turning on ASYNC Compute did improve performance in the game quite a bit compared to without, as much as 20 FPS difference positive. It improved performance at 1440p and 4K both with and without Ray Tracing. That’s very important for achieving the new performance of this patch, ASYNC Compute works great on the GeForce RTX 3080 FE, the final build of the patch should work just fine.
For Wolfenstein: Youngblood this game now supports Ray Traced reflections and DLSS. We used the game in the Vulkan API with and without these features testing performance. We utilized the in-game benchmark of Riverside for our tests.
1440p
In our first graph, we are comparing performance at 1440p with the highest in-game setting of “Mein leben.” We also have NVIDIA Shading turned on to the highest quality in the advanced game settings for all video cards. This setting can only be enabled when DLSS is not used. In this game even our GeForce RTX 2080 FE is doing wonders at 153 FPS, which is definitely playable, so the game is not held back. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE does improve performance even without Ray Tracing and already high performance. At 274 FPS it is 79% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 27% faster than GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE.
In this graph, we have now enabled the Ray Traced Reflections in the game. Performance does move way down for each card, but the GeForce RTX 2080 FE still manages to provide very playable performance at 85 FPS. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE though, dominates them all at 162 FPS with Ray Tracing. It is 90% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 46% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE, which is surprising.
Now we have enabled DLSS in combination with Ray Tracing. Performance jumps up on all video cards. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is 82% faster than the RTX 2080 FE and 45% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti FE.
4K
In this graph, we have switched to 4K resolution at “Mein leben” but with no Ray Tracing. 4K performance is very good on the GeForce RTX 3080 FE producing 155 FPS, but even the GeForce RTX 2080 FE manages 88 FPS at 4K in this game. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is 76% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 32% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE.
With Ray Traced Reflections turned on we finally start to see the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 2080 SUPER suffer at lower framerates. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE though is very playable at 60 FPS. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE surpasses it though at 91 FPS which is a whopping 98% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE! It’s 44% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE. It’s just amazing that the RTX 3080 FE is almost double the performance of the RTX 2080 FE here with Ray Tracing enabled. That’s just pretty darned impressive.
Turning on DLSS helps performance across the board with Ray Tracing enabled. The GeForce RTX 3080 FE is 94% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 FE and 47% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE.