Today is the start of a new and very exciting era for 2kliksphilip. One that’s hopefully
filled with worse advice, lower CS:GO content and danker memes. For DinoPC have sponsored
me, 2kliksphilip! They know where it’s at. They’ve provided me with what I’m calling
the 6core-o-saurus, cos it has like, 6 cores and 32 gigs of RAM and flashy lights. Oh and
a Geforce 1080, designed for full HD gaming! Look there’s all the components. Turns out
that grass is wet in the mornings and as I’m crouched here, water’s seeping up into the
PSU so it’s probably best to just go home. Not sure what the point was in coming up here
any way. BUT WHY DO YOU NEED SUCH A MACHINE, you might
ask. YOU WERE DANK ENOUGH ANYWAY! Well, now I can be dank at 4K. BUT WHY? You might cry.
NONE OF US HAVE 4K MONITORS. To which, I say… I- I dunno. I just want to. Plus, you can’t
tell what to do! I’ve got rights! So, let’s benchmark this mother. But to
make things interesting, it’s going to be up against my old PC. An i7 3770k, 16 GB of
RAM and a Geforce 670. But here’s the twist: my new PC has to compete at 4x the resolution!
Will it win? First up: Grand Theft Auto 5. I tested it
on lowest everything first just for LOLs and both computers managed more than 100 FPS average,
with the DinoPC comfortably winning with an average of 170 FPS compared with my old PC’s
PATHETIC 138 FPS. Now to max it out. Can my 6core-o-saurus manage it?
…No. Grand Theft Auto 5, at 4K, with EVERY SETTING MAXED OUT and 8X AA runs at an average
of 23 FPS. Acceptable for consoles, perhaps, but not for me. I’m so disappointed. Why
can’t it run it? Blah blah blah. Never fear, using the settings suggested in Nvidia’s
Experience program thing, it turned the game down to a mixture of high and very high with
2x AA and it manages a very respectable 54 FPS average, beating out my old PC’s 47
FPS at the same settings but at HD. Of course with a bit of tweaking I could have hit that
60 FPS mark, but… couldn’t be bothered. Disabling ambient occlusion would probably
have done it. So, a win for my new PC. Now for the age-old
question: Can it run Crysis? 3? I like this game. The settings are easy to understand,
being just low, medium, high and very high. I know where I stand with these. I tested
the low preset and my old PC won by over 20 FPS! Set to Very High it made both drop below
the 60 FPS mark, with my old PC still winning by 6 FPS. And at high it also won, but both
systems achieved over 60 FPS and the game looked lovely. So yes, I would be disappointed
with this… but I know that I could just lower my new PC to HD and win. But that would
be too EZ. Shadow of Mordor is the most interesting result
I got. My old pc wins when on lowest settings, but turning up the settings and it quickly
begins struggling. This is because the game’s textures eat a lot of RAM and my old PC’s
2 GB of videocard memory just isn’t enough anymore. At Very High my new Geforce 1080
PC takes the lead, with its 8 GB of RAM gobbling up all those tasty textures. And when maxed
out, it obliterates the old PC’s performance, scoring almost 3 x the framerate.
Now for Arma 3, a particularly CPU-intensive game- provided I didn’t mind medium settings
my old PC could run it at 4K pretty well! That being said, my new PC wins on all settings
that I compared. I was surprised by how low the FPS was in general- even when ‘only’
set to Ultra, it drops well below the 60 FPS mark though it doesn’t seem to matter as
much in this game as most- I find that aside from draw distance, most of the options don’t
make much of an improvement beyond high settings any way. This game is more scalable than most
and it’s easy to find a balance that looks and plays well on both PCs.
Rome 2 kind of scared me off the series a bit, which is why I have no newer games to
test with. It really impressed me here though by looking as bad as possible while still
managing to slow my computers down. The colour correction really makes the place look drab,
the environment models are uninspired and the units, although detailed, are riddled
with pop up and artefacts. That being said, my new PC managed to look bad at a higher
framerate, achieving 70 FPS at Ultra settings. According to the game’s options, ‘high’
is the 3rd worst looking mode, so maybe I should just play it on that and be happy.
It’s just that what with very high, ultra and EXTREME further down it kind of raises
my expectations about my computer’s performance and how the game should look and perform at
these settings.
Quintus Varus give me back my…
…FPS.
I also tested Hitman Absolution, which isn’t the newest in the series I know but still
brought my new PC below 60 FPS at Very High settings. I bet it’s the lens flare that
does it. Jumping from Very Low, to Very High, to everything maxed out almost exactly halved
framerates every time, yet there weren’t many noticeable differences to the image quality
apart from a bit less pop up at higher settings. And to finish it all off, the latest 3DMark.
I’m always amazed by how they think up new ways of slowing PCs down. A while ago they
began adding volumetric fog everywhere, making the empty space between objects slow your
PC down more than the stuff itself- pure genius. But they’ve outdone themselves again with
Timespy by featuring a room full of older benchmarks, all running simultaneously! But
why stop there? Let’s really bring PCs to their knees by having high-polycount tessellation
literally consume the room! Unlike the previous tests, both my PCs had
to run this benchmark at the same resolution, making their results directly comparable.
My old one got less than 2000 points and my new one was approaching 7000, which I think
is about on-par with what I’d expect. 4K in general seems somewhere between 3 and 4
times more demanding than HD. If you’re getting 120 FPS now at full HD then you can
expect the same settings to perform somewhere between 30 and 40 FPS at 4K. I’m happy to
say that, judging from the results I’ve seen, the Geforce 1080 is about 4 times as
powerful as my old Geforce 670. And just for lol’s, here’s my 2 PCs running
the older Firestrike demo at 4K. Hahaha. The CPUs are a little harder to compare. My
old i7 3770k is still a very capable processor. Most people upgrading today would choose a
new 4 core 6700k. Certainly not a bad decision, but it didn’t feel like enough of a leap
for me which is why I opted for a slightly slower, but core-ier 6800k. 3DMark thinks
it’s 70% faster, though in most games and applications I don’t feel much of a difference.
It does feel awesome to know that even if I disable one that there are still 11 threads
working on something in the background, be it a map compile or video render. And with
Zen coming out later this year I think we’ll see a shift to 6, 8 and maybe even more cores
in the not-too-distant future, making a 6 core processor more of a future investment
than something that will benefit me right now. But hey, I can now watch 8K youtube videos
smoothly, which was something my old PC never managed!
Thanks again to DinoPC for this… PC, you can check their site out in my video’s description.
Some of you may criticise my PC for being unable to game at 4K with everything maxed
or whatever, to which I’ll say this: Things have changed. Back in the day, higher
settings made a HUGE difference to how the game looked. Now they look great, even at
low settings, with higher ones delivering disproportionately large FPS drops for the
graphical improvements that they provide. We used to be able to max out everything,
but we had fewer options. Now, we have more choices and still expect to be able to have
it all! But maybe we should just look at what we want MOST, rather than expecting everything.
Want to game at high FPS? Sure, you can do that. Want to game at ULTRA settings? Yes,
you can do that too. Want to game at insanely high resolutions? You can do that too. I reckon
that if you only care about one of these things that a Radeon 460 will be fine for a number
of years. Even the almighty Geforce 1080 won’t let you do all 3 things at once perfectly,
but it’ll do a compromise of all 3, or 1-2 of these things exceptionally well but at
the expense of the other. Maybe I’m making excuses. But I… don’t care. I don’t
need ultra-settings with antialiasing. I actually don’t! High settings are enough and look
almost identical to me. It’s nice to have the option of ULTRA post-processing for post-processing
enthusiasts, but high looks like some high quality post-processed pixels to me. My time
with CS:GO has shown me that even 60 FPS isn’t enough in some cases, so even if I could still
technically run an option I’d still rather have a more solid minimum FPS.
And this is coming from someone who used to game at 640x480 at 30 FPS just so that I could
have parallaxed walls enabled in the game FEAR. Things have changed. Unlike older games,
new ones set high standards, even on lower settings. Well, apart from Rome 2.
And best of all I can now capture footage at 60 FPS and at 4K. It’s been a goal of
mine for over a year, in a quest for ever-improving video quality. And thanks to DinoPC, now I
can. And better than I used to at HD, if these results are anything to go by.