Sniper Elite 4 Performance Review

Sniper Elite 4 Performance Review

Introduction

Sniper Elite 4 is easily one of the most interesting PC releases of 2017 so far, sporting support for DirectX 12 Async Compute and Multi-GPU configurations from day-1, a rarity in the modern PC gaming market.  

With recent iterations, Sniper Elite has become a much more “open-world” style experience, with spacious maps that are filled with activity. From a technical standpoint Sniper Elite 4 is a huge upgrade over the game’s previous releases, with this game’s smallest map being 3x larger than the biggest map of Sniper Elite 4. 

Rebellion’s motto for this release has been “out with the old and in with the new”, dropping support for the ageing PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles and working to take advantage of modern gaming hardware. Sniper Elite 4 will also be the first game in the series to support DirectX 12, replacing the AMD Mantle support found in Sniper Elite 3 and delivering PC users with one of the first PC games that supports DirectX 12 on day-1. 

Performance wise the biggest questions are how DirectX 12 will affect gaming performance, especially when using older GPU architectures. Will DirectX 12 finally offer the performance gains that we crave or continue to be a disappointment? 

 

 

Drivers 

For this game, we will be using the newest drivers that were available when the game released, which is Nvidia’s Game Ready Geforce 378.57 driver and AMD’s 17.2.1 driver, both of which are the most recent GPU drivers for either company. 

 

Test Setup  

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using both high-end and mid-range GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. 

 

Game Test Rig
Intel i7 6850K
ASUS X99 Strix
Corsair Vengeance 4x8GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 

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Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Middle) GTX 1070 Founders Edition (Right)

 

For the high-end, we will be testing AMD’s R9 Fury X, the GTX 980Ti and Nvidia’s new GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs.  

For the Mid-range offerings, we will be testing the new RX 480 and GTX 1060, both of which will be the ASUS Strix Gaming models.

 

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ASUS GTX 1060 Strix (Left), ASUS RX 480 Strix (Right)

 

To represent AMD and Nvidia’s lower-end GPU offerings we have decided to use the AMD R9 380 and the Nvidia GTX 960. Both of these GPUs will be the ASUS Strix models. 

Both of these GPUs offer very similar performance in most scenarios and come in at very similar price points, so it will be very interesting to see which GPU will come out on top. 

 

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Nvidia GTX 960(Left), AMD R9 380(Right)