Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus PC Performance Review

CPU Benchmarks – Ryzen & Intel – Do you need a big CPU to fight some Nazis? 

Methodology

Full on CPU performance testing is something that is relatively new in our PC game performance analysis pieces, with Ryzen performance being a new addition to our hardware test suite.

Here we have tested the game using an Intel i7 6850K Broadwell-E Hex-core and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X over a variety of core configurations when playing the game at 1080p max settings on a GTX 1080. Both CPUs are run at similar clock speeds.

We ran our Ryzen 7 1700X with 8/16, 6/12, 4/8 and 4/4 core/thread configurations to closely match results from Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 processors. Note that in all of these tests that 16MB of L3 cache was active and that these are not exact emulations of each Ryzen series CPU at the same clock speeds. Even so, these results represent a reasonable ballpark figure.

On the Intel side, we tested 6/12, 4/8, 4/4 and 2/4 core configurations to represent Intel’s current generation i3, i5 and i7 CPU core configurations. Both CPUs are clocked at 4.0GHz.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

In our CPU testing, it is clear that Wolfenstein II is not CPU limited, with even our dual-core quad-thread setup offering a satisfactory gameplay experience. When comparing Ryzen and Intel Broadwell-E we also found a very limited performance difference, one that is almost negligible in the grand scheme of things. 

One of the big advantages of low-level APIs is the ability to get more from modern CPUs and take better advantage of the hardware available, with Machine Games showcasing exactly how much the Vulkan API can offer gamers, delivering framerates of well over 60FPS when we restrict our system to only two CPU cores. This is great news for those of us that use older CPUs.