Nvidia Adaptive Shading Boosts Wolfenstein II’s Performance

Yesterday marked the release of the first game with Nvidia Adaptive Shading (NAS) support, arriving on Wolfenstein: The New Colossus to enable increased performance on Turing-based graphics cards. 

With the feature’s current implementation; Performance, Balanced and Quality options are available in-game as well as the opportunity to disable the feature entirely, with the feature enabling performance boosts of around 2% in Quality mode and 7% in Performance mode on average. 

Wolfenstein II is a strange use case for this feature, as none of Nvidia’s current Turing offerings has any trouble running the game at 4K with 60+ FPS framerates, making NAS useless for the most part. In most cases, HardwareLuxx has reported that they could not find any graphical differences in the game for the most part, though they have reported strange artefacts in some locations. 
 

  

While the performance gains that are offered with NAS are minimal, it is hard not to be impressed with the feature, enabling higher framerates with a dip in graphical quality that is designed to be unnoticeable. In time we will see if similar artefacts are presented in future NAS enabled games, or if this bug will be ironed out with a new Wolfenstein patch. 

Sadly, Nvidia Adaptive Shading utilises hardware within Turing graphics cards to function, making it impossible to implement the feature for Pascal or older graphics cards or competing Radeon hardware. 

You can join the discussion on the performance impact of Nvidia Adaptive Shading on Wolfenstein II on the OC3D Forums.