Graphics memory (VRAM) usage and conclusion

Graphics memory (VRAM) usage

How much graphics memory does the game utilize versus your monitor resolution with different graphics cards and respective VRAM sizes? Well, let's have a look at the chart below. The listed MBs used in the chart are the maximum measured utilized graphics memory during the test run. 

So, I mentioned that at the Mein leben! quality preset the 4GB cards take a big hit once they reach 2560x1440. It is weird as to why that is happening. In the above chart, I took one of the worse performing 4GB cards, the Fury series. You can see that at 2560x1440 this setting hits 3640 MB of graphics memory, so it still has a tiny bit left.  From there onwards in the most scenarios you'll notice your VRAM is nearly or 100% filled flat out full, then memory gets emptied chunk by chunk bit and then filled again.

So what happens when we give the game a title with virtually endless VRAM, the 11GB GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Well, graphics memory usage quickly climbs towards 5500 MB at 1920x1080 and closing in at 6500 MB in Ultra HD - Wowzers. So the minute the game see spare VRAM, it'll utilize it. Yes, VRAM behaves a little weird in some occasions depending on your graphics card with the Mein leben! setting. Still, most graphics cards within its category are offer very decent framerates. Up-to Full HD (1920x1080) in fact any ~4 GB graphics card of decent caliber should do the job well. I would advise 6 GB or more should be sufficient for 2560x1440. If you want to play Ultra quality with Ultra HD as preferred monitor resolution, 6GB or 8GB is advised. Again, we're talking the best quality modus here. Drop it down a notch and FPS will compensate on poor perf.

 Concluding

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a very sadistic and gory game. Not my type or style at all, but the fact that it is a Vulkan API only title triggered and parked my interest to test it. Honestly, it looks pretty okay graphics wise, reasonable textures, great facial animation and proper CPU threading (nice to see) but however, it's a bug riddled game though. For this review, we had to swap out 20 graphics cards and tested on three different PCs. And half of the time we had issues:

Problem-solving Wolfenstein II The New Colossus:

• We had lots of issues with the game crashing and creating a dump file when switching to Ultra HD with the GeForce cards. On the Radeon cards, this was not an issue.
• Sometimes the game would simply not start up - often clearing the Steam game cache resolved this but in some cases, we had to download and install the 55GB game again - ridiculous.
• Sometimes the game would simply not start up (2) - completely reinstalling the graphics card driver sometimes fixed it.
• In some occasions after a crash (and the game can crash alright) the menu ended up with a white screen. The only way to solve and bypass this is to go the "User - saved games - machine games - Wolfenstein II" directory and delete the "base" directory to be able to get a working menu again.  Small tip, make a backup of that directory as your savegames are in there as well. By restoring them you can continue your game afterward.

Another complaint about the game (and this goes for many games these days), is that it quite easily eats away 55 GB of your expensive SSD space. The download sizes and installs numbers are getting hideously big in volume size. From a graphics point of view, the good news is that you will not require an enthusiast class PC to run at the proper quality. Up-to 1920x1080 a GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580 will hold really well. Overall, the issues I ran into had a lot to do with all the hardware swaps, so for the most people, this will not be an issue. For those, the game will be enjoyable, with decent graphics. The Vulkan API obviously runs really well, nice CPU threading. Graphics cards performance wise, AMD Radeon cards have the advantage here thanks to the Vulkan API. Nvidia GeForce cards, however, perform well but not as exceptional as to what AMD can do so yeah props to them for that.
 
 

 
Since FCAT is not supported with Vulkan just yet I recorded a couple of minutes gameplay with the Afterburner overlay displaying FPS and frame time plotted in real-time. As you will see things are fairly smooth overall, with such framerates errors are hard to spot. The recording is taken at 4k Ultra HD (3840x2160 80 Mbit/s) with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. 

Please do make sure you have installed the latest compatible graphics card driver, the new 17.11.1 or higher driver from AMD, as well as at least GeForce 388.13 or the newer drivers as these, have been optimized for the game. You can download the latest AMD Catalyst drivers here and the Nvidia GeForce drivers here.

- H.

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