This is Teardown, running without a graphics card. It seems a little bit unfair to do this
when the game recommends a Geforce 1080. But as you can see, it does at least run. At low
settings, with 50% scaling. And then it quickly drops to unacceptable performance the moment
destruction starts. What I’m using here is a Ryzen 2200G, which
is a 4 core processor with onboard graphics comprising of 8 Vega cores. It was able to
run almost every game out in 2018, provided I dropped the settings and resolution to the
bare minimum. But running Teardown is a bit beyond it. But we are talking about a game
with crazy-advanced physics and raytracing here.
I even tried full 1080p, high settings. Settings the Geforce 1080 is recommended for. Obviously
using the 2200G it’s well into slideshow territory, but I thought it was still fun
to see. Because I like this kind of stuff. And since you’re here, I hope you do too!
As a last attempt to get playable performance, I dropped it to 720p, low settings, and at
50% resolution scaling. This managed a fluid 60 FPS! Sometimes reaching well beyond that.
But then it should be able to- this was a resolution consoles were using in the 90’s!
And while the experience in general was smooth at these ultra low settings, it still wasn’t
fast enough to maintain decent framerates when the action really got started. And some
of the bigger levels were still beyond what the poor little APU was capable of.
Welcome to the Teardown experience. It’s one of the toughest games to benchmark. It
would be easy to benchmark a lap around a level, but that’s in no way representative
of gameplay. The game’s about DESTRUCTION, that when stuff’s randomly flying about
and setting on fire, that makes it really hard to design a consistent benchmark for.
So instead, I’ve just decided to run about, destroying stuff and seeing how long the PC
could hold up for, and how unreliable the framerates would become once they did start
dropping. In general, expect okay-ish performance in
Teardown when simply running about, but for performance to fall off a cliff the moment
explosions, smoke and fire starts going off everywhere. In extreme situations, fast PCs
might still slow down from these effects, but they’ll quickly climb back up into playable
performance again, while slower PCs will remain stuck in low FPS hell for longer. Possibly
even forever! In the Ryzen 2200G’s case, it is a fragile
thing, being the slowest thing I’ve tested the game on. But it’s useful in showing
what you can expect performance with and without action to look like, on a card that’s struggling
to run this game. You will be able to load Teardown with a 2200G, but you won’t have
a good time. Avoid.
But using it, I discovered that this lighthouse level is a great place to benchmark the game.
This level is hard on graphics cards, and destroying the lighthouse and the wooden huts
here serves as a good stress-test for them. Let’s move on to the next graphics card
up and hope that will be able to run the game.
Which is a Radeon 6870! No, that’s not one of the ones that’s coming out later this
month. It is instead the OLD 6000 series. Since then, AMD’s gone a full cycle, running
out of other numbers to use and having to use the 6000 name again. THAT’s how old
this card is. I picked this one up in 2013, second hand… for £64. So even this graphics
card is hopefully slower than whatever’s currently powering your PC. And if not…
just buy a better one on ebay.
In terms of performance, the 6870 is still a big leap up from the Ryzen 2200G, which
is more like the speed of a Radeon 4870. This time I started on the lighthouse level,
at high settings, 1080p. Still slideshow performance, as you’d expect. It wasn’t until I dropped
to 50% scaling, low settings that I got something that resembled playable framerates. In the
campaign you’ll rarely need to lob a bunch of pipebombs like this, so tanking performance
here is acceptable. What isn’t is how long this graphics card took to recover from it.
The whole experience dragged along in slow motion for farrrr too long to be acceptable.
Later on, a single bomb was enough to drop it below 30 fps again. It seems like it’s
the smoke effects that hurt graphics cards the most. But since you’ll be detonating
bombs in this manner a fair few times over the course of the campaign, the fact it’s
struggling here doesn’t bode well. Other levels in the game also quickly slowed
this card down, even after minimal destruction. And on this lighthouse level, even after the
dust had settled, when enough destruction had already been done, performance refused
to climb back over the 30 fps mark again, so it’s safe to say that this game requires
more graphics performance than the Radeon 6870 is capable of. Obviously.
The Radeon 380! This is more like an updated Radeon 7950, finally bringing us SORT OF up
to the present day in terms of budget gaming performance. With so much more power under
the hood than with the 6870, it performed well on the lighthouse level, managing smooth
performance when running about or when performing acts of light destruction. A pipebomb barrage
ended that, but performance eventually climbed again after the smoke had dissipated.
Large-scale destruction and fire still dropped it to a slideshow, but then I decided that
this is an optional (but appealing) aspect of the game, and decided to boot up some of
the campaign missions instead to see what sort of performance could be expected.
The home hub is a surprisingly demanding area of the game! It hovered about 30 fps here,
which wasn’t great, but wasn’t terrible either. I decided that in the starting level
it could easily handle low settings, so upped it to native 1080p, high settings and still
got 20-30 fps, which dropped to about 15 during collapses. I don’t think you’d play like
this, but it is cool to see how we’re heading in the right way towards acceptable performance.
I ran about Lee at 75% scaling, high settings. Large fires and destruction killed performance,
but under general conditions I would say it was borderline playable. But you’d still
want more graphical overhead to play with because inevitably, destruction DOES happen.
And it is inconsistent. What can I say, the Radeon 380 can run this
game, especially if you drop settings. But I feel there will still be situations where
it slows down more than you’d want it to, and from less destruction than seems fair.
I can’t give you a more solid verdict on this card than that I’m afraid.
AMD cards don’t perform as well as Nvidia ones in Teardown. On paper, the Radeon 380
is roughly on-par with the Geforce 680 that I tested before the game’s release. But
performance with the Radeon 380 felt worse, slowed down more during action, and took longer
to recover. Maybe there have been changes to the game since last time- I didn’t bother
testing the 680 again for this video. And it could be because the Radeon 380 only has
2 GB compared with the 680’s 4. But I think there’s more to it than that. Coming into
this testing, I wasn’t surprised to see AMD performing slower, since a lot of you
were saying it in the comments section, and even the game’s maker, Dennis, said that
performance on his Vega 64 wasn’t very good. And that’s a card that should be as fast
as the Geforce 1080- the card that was recommended for this game! Let’s be honest here: Teardown
is a game made by a small studio, and was built using an Nvidia card. AMD’s cards
didn’t even work in the early version of Teardown that I tested, he only got them working
again weeks before official release. So at least that’s some positive news. But with
the game now finally being out in early access, I’m hoping that attention is turned to optimising
the game for AMD. Looking at how they perform in other games, AMD cards shouldn’t be slower
than their Nvidia counterparts. And it is a shame to see them performing so poorly on
this title.
What I decided to do last was to compare an AMD and Nvidia card of roughly equal performance.
I used an 8 GB Radeon 480, and tested it against a 4 GB Geforce 970. These were both tested
on my fastest PC, so there was nothing to hold their performance back. In theory, the
480 should have a slight advantage. It is the slightly faster card. But in practice,
the 970 was about 50% faster, and its performance didn’t tank as heavily in action. It made
a big difference to how playable the Lee level felt.
I also tested both at lowest settings on the lighthouse level. The Geforce 970 ran ridiculously
fast, well over 100 fps even during destruction, but even this card’s performance failed
under extreme destruction. But at least it was able to recover quickly again, in just
a second or so. The 480, on the other hand, ran much slower.
I only got above 100 fps when staring at the sky, but the rest of the time it ran about
half the speed of the Geforce 970. And the framerates would drop to unacceptable levels
from even simple destruction. There’s definitely SOMETHING going on here.
Maybe it’s the smoke effects. But AMD cards should be running faster in this game than
they are. I accept that I’ve been testing some especially old and slow hardware, but
their performance just seems less consistent than their Nvidia counterparts.
I wasn’t able to test a Vega or Navi card myself, but my friend has a Radeon 5700 XT
and was able to test Teardown out on it. In fact, better than that- he’s just been using
the card to play through the game, at 1440p high settings. And he’s happy with the experience
that he’s getting. He says it hovers between 40-60 fps most of the time, dropping to 35
if there’s a lot of damage in the level. With a few explosions it can drop to 20 to
30 fps, recovering after a few seconds depending on how much fire there is. And the worst performance
he’s encountered is pipebomb barrages, which can drop it down to sub-10 fps if he goes
particularly crazy with them. Of course, it being 1440p high settings, he
has plenty of options to turn down if he wanted better performance, but he feels it’s playable
as it is. I suspect it’s worse than a rival Nvidia card like the Geforce 2070 Super would
be getting, but I guess once you reach this level of performance it has enough raw power
to push through how unoptimized it is. The 5700 XT is AMD’s current fastest graphics
card, and being Navi, is similar to the architecture seen in the upcoming 6000 series, so hopefully
we can learn a thing or two about them from how this card performs in Teardown.
Assuming they’ll only perform better than the 5700 XT does, it bodes well for AMD’s
upcoming cards, and I’m hoping that with a few game updates, Teardown will soon run
better for everyone.