Game Benchmarks
Watch Dogs Legions
Watch Dogs Legions came out just October of last year, and with it came with some impressive next-generation visuals through its heavy use of ray tracing. Atop of that, this game includes a high-resolution texture option which we enable in all our testing. With everything at the max, this game can really stress current gaming systems. Let’s go ahead and see how the chart looks now that the games been out a little while and seen some updates.
We decided to use 1440p for this title as the increase in fidelity for this single-player title was worth a slightly slower framerate. This title does not suffer too greatly so long as you are above 45 FPS average and we see our cards all managing to do so with differing levels of success. Our ASUS Rog Strix GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition is managing a 47 FPS average after running the built-in benchmark at Ultra settings with HD Textures. This is a 2.15% difference in a scenario where every added frame counts.
With that in mind, we turned to the Resize Bar feature as it’s one of the few titles with official support as peer NVIDIA themselves. Our results were lower than the 9.1% gain that we see here, but nevertheless, we gained performance. The increase was meaningful, pushing us from the 47 FPS average to near 49 FPS average, or a 4.16% jump in performance. This was again beaten by manual tuning, with our overclock providing us a 50 FPS average which is 2% faster than the Resize Bar result and 6.18% faster than stock operation.
Wolfenstein Youngblood
Continuing on with our traditional game-play testing, we find ourselves loading up Wolfenstein Youngblood without DLSS or Ray Tracing enabled first.
The hierarchy stands as it has in previous graphs, with our ASUS ROG STRIX card managing a +4 FPS advantage at 132 FPS average, or 3% faster than the EVGA XC BLACK GAMING. Turning on Resize Bar shows an imperceptible difference at 133 FPS average or 0.75% faster. Overclocking on the other hand nets a large gain of 8%, which works out to 143 FPS average. These cards may be meant for 1080p but they manage to provide a great 1440p experience in this title.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn is an action-adventure game ported for release on PC as of August 7th, 2020. The game makes use of the DX12 API as its only option. Graphics options in this game are fairly simple, with a total of nine options for the user to adjust. We will be utilizing the game’s built-in benchmark and graphics presets, which range from Favor Performance, Orginal (PS4 Fidelity), Favor Quality, and Ultimate Quality.
A small lead is seen here for the ASUS ROG STRIX 3060 video card, with a 76 FPS average coming in at 2.6% faster than the EVGA card. Resize Bar pushes us up to 77 FPS average which translates to 1.3% faster than stock. Overclocking again produces the most impressive result with an average of 81 FPS which is 6.3% faster than stock and 5% faster than the Resize Bar result. All in all every sample here manages more than enough frames for an enjoyable gameplay experience here at 1440p.
F1-2020
F1-2020 is a Codemasters title and the latest release in the series of racing games. For this game we stuck to the Italy map for our run-through, using the internal benchmark for our data.
Switching gears over to the F1-2020 benchmark, using the Italy course, we see great results at 1440p for a card that targets the mid-range market. Comparing our stock results we see a +3 FPS average for the ASUS ROG STRIX video card when facing the EVGA XC BLACK GAMING. This 115 FPS average is 2.6% faster than the competition in this title. With Resize Bar in the picture, we jump up by +2 FPS to reach 117 FPS average or 1.7% faster than stock. Overclocking makes the most meaningful impact here with a +7 FPS (+5.8%) advantage over the Resize Bar result and a +9 FPS (+7.5%) advantage over the stock result.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that needs no introduction to our community, being the high-profile title that it is. Launched for PC on December 5th, 2019, this game is known to be demanding for almost any video card. A mixture of settings was used for this title, with all Ultra options enabled.
In Red Dead Redemption 2 we see a small change in the results thus far. Our Resize Bar enabled option does not provide any increase in performance beyond some slight spikes in max frame rates that are not indicative of the gameplay experience provided. This could be a result of no optimization in this title or the drivers but it’s not clear. Looking at our ASUS ROG STRIX video card we see a +1 FPS advantage in this title over the EVGA XC BLACK GAMING, or 2.15% faster. With Resize Bar enabled we get the same result, but with an overclock we push up by +3 FPS and reach 50 FPS average. This is a healthy 6% faster and the gameplay experience is improved by the most meaningful amount with this manual tune-up.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is a new addition to this test suite and for good reason. Atop of being one of the biggest game drops as of late, it’s also one graphically intensive title. In Cyberpunk 2077, we are using patch version 1.2 of the game, the Ultra “Quick Preset” without modifications. We are utilizing a custom driving course at night and averaging our results after multiple runs.
This was a title that required us to lower our resolution down to 1080p to the performance we needed. At 1440p these cards struggled in this title but they performed quite well at 1080p with the Ultra preset enabled. Our ASUS ROG STRIX put a great showing up with a 60 FPS average which was 5% faster than the EVGA XC BLACK GAMING which produced 57 FPS on our test bench. With a quick changing of a BIOS setting, we see a +2 FPS (3.2%) gain in performance netting us a 62 FPS average. Overclocking does see performance increase again but not by much at all, with a 63 FPS average, or +1FPS (1.6%) faster.