I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that AMD’s and NVIDIA’s driver engineers never sleep. Last week, both companies ushered in a new driver to tackle the latest releases, such as Destiny 2, and now, both are at it again, with both offering optimized drivers for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
On the AMD side, the latest driver you’ll want to snag is 17.10.3, and for NVIDIA, you’ll want 388.13. Both drivers tackle Wolfenstein II, as mentioned, but NVIDIA’s also adds specific support for Call of Duty: WWII, as well as Need for Speed Payback.
Both of these drivers launch at a coincidental time, as I just wrapped-up our updated GPU test suite (in advance of 1070 Ti launch) last night. I am glad I didn’t get too much benching done since then, since I truly didn’t expect yet another driver to launch today. It’s most useful because Wolfenstein II happens to be one such game I introduced into the revised suite, effectively replacing DOOM.
Whereas DOOM offered support for the Vulkan API, Wolfenstein II uses it exclusively. This is something that caught me off guard, because as I was testing, I was looking all over for the option to choose it, not realizing it’s the only option. Because of this, I’ll be using PresentMon to capture the game’s framerates, which unfortunately means I’ll only be able to provide average FPS, as I’m still clueless on how to extrapolate any other data from the tool’s output files.
What I can say about Wolf II so far is that it’s a very, very smooth-running game. It’s actually been challenging for me to find a place in the game suitable for testing, because the bulk of the start of the game keeps you indoors. It’s on the agenda this afternoon to progress further and find a better spot for benchmarking, because a TITAN Xp is giving me about 150 FPS at 1440p/Max Detail, so an outdoor scene would be ideal.
Not that it isn’t obvious, but Wolfenstein II is not a game for the faint of heart. I actually hated having to endure forced cutscenes because some of them were so gruesome or simply heart-wrenching. Cutscenes that can really open your eyes to the realities of the evilness that permeate through certain ideologies. Perhaps it’s the sign of a good game, because not long in, I started thinking of the enemies as animals rather than human beings. Now I gotta hate whenever I get down to benchmarking a new GPU. I did Nazi that coming!
On the technical side, Wolfenstein II takes advantage of asynchronous shaders, rapid packed math, and clustered forward rendering. Ultimately, the game is going to run extremely well on modern hardware, and even better on hardware optimized for the Vulkan API. Expect benchmark results soon.