Fallout 4 - AMD vs Nvidia Performance Review

Update - Optimized AMD Catalyst 15.11.1 Drivers

For PC gamers driver updates are very important, especially for new releases, they can fix bugs, provide more performance and typically give a superior gaming experience if you are using the latest drivers.  Sometimes new drivers can add new bugs, though this is something that had became much rarer in recent years. 

AMD today released new Catalyst 15.11.1 drivers, a beta driver which includes game optimizations for Fallout 4, Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Star Wars Battlefront. Since AMD has had performance issues with this game, which were primarily due to Godrays, we decided to retest Fallout 4 with these new drivers, hoping that AMD have been able to address the issue, which thankfully they have. 

When compared to their old drivers the difference is night and day, with the new drivers we see minimums leap to almost where AMD's averages were and have seen AMD's average framerate rise up to become very competitive with Nvidia. Now at 4K the performance is almost identical, but with a higher minimum framerate I'd actually say that AMD has the lead now. 

Moving down to lower resolutions we find Nvidia's GTX 980Ti continue to be the performance leader, but now it is not to anywhere near the same extent. 

Godrays- On or Off

When we have tested AMD's new drivers with Godrays on and off, we found that the performance gains when Godrays were turned off didn't have anywhere near the same performance benefit as we saw when they were maxed out, showing that this is where AMD has worked hardest to improve the games performance. 

Now with Godrays off we again see AMD's minimum framerate go higher than Nvidia's minimum at 4K, but Nvidia still have the largest average framerate.