Sniper Elite 4 Performance Review

Conclusion

One of OC3D’s biggest hopes for 2017 was to see DirectX 12 games release with Day-1 support that is worth using, though to say the least, we didn’t expect to see this wish achieved so soon. With recent game releases DirectX 12 support has been often delayed and frequently provided a performance downgrade over their existing DirectX 11 versions, leaving many PC gamers disappointed in the new API. 

Rebellion, the developers of Sniper Elite 4, were one of the first studios to take advantage of AMD’s Mantle API, making them one of the few studios with enough knowledge of modern graphical APIs in order to make proper use of modern GPU hardware. In our testing DirectX 12 was able to benefit game performance is most situations, especially at lower resolutions and when using AMD hardware.   

This is one of the first times that we have seen a DirectX 12 title that can benefit both AMD and Nvidia graphics hardware, which is great to see on Day-1. Nvidia’s older Maxwell-powered GPUs will see very limited performance changes, with performance degradation in some situations, though this is due mostly to Maxwell’s sub-par Asynchronous Compute support when compared to Pascal and Polaris. 

Gameplay wise Sniper Elite 4 plays very smoothly, with no crashes or major issues after almost a full day’s worth of gameplay. While the game’s graphics are not the most beautiful out there the game’s many large maps are believable and feel like they are active and full of life. 

When compared to Sniper Elite 3 the game has improved in almost every possible aspect, with larger maps, varying objectives and a wide range of ways to achieve your mission goals. Technically speaking it is impressive to see how far Rebellion’s game engine has come over the past few years, with Sniper Elite 4’s smallest map being over 3x larger than Sniper Elite 3’s smallest. This will allow players to take shots at extended ranges and give players more choice in how they tackle their objectives.  

After comparing the performance of AMD and Nvidia hardware it can be very unclear who is the performance leader, with Nvidia’s GTX 1060 offering more performance than AMD’s RX 480 but with AMD’s R9 380 offering vastly more performance than Nvidia’s older GTX 960. It seems that with this game AMD’s GPU have aged much better than their Nvidia counterparts, especially in the lower-end of the market, though Nvidia’s modern Pascal-based GPUs still rule the high-end of the GPU market.  

Sniper Elite 4 is a game that is certainly worth playing on PC, especially if you enjoy the game’s “sniper x-ray vision” gimmick. The game offers both a single player and co-op campaign missions as well as a dedicated multiplayer competitive mode. Performance wise Sniper Elite is a game that can be incredibly demanding when played at high resolutions, though fairly easy to run well with the correct tweaks to graphical settings and perhaps a reduction in resolution scale. 

 

You can join the discussion on Sniper Elite 4’s PC performance on the OC3D Forums.