Wolfenstein: Youngblood PC Performance Review

Nvidia Adaptive Shading – Is this the future?

The curse of Nvidia’s Adaptive Shading (NAS) technique is that its impact is largely scene dependant, and assumes that the shading rate is the limiting factor in Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s performance. 

In our test scene, only our RTX 2080 Ti graphics card benefitted from Nvidia Adaptive Shading, and even then this gain was only seen at 4K. That said, at 4K the performance gain offered by NAS is able to deliver increased minimum and average framerates. Smaller gains are also seen at 1440p. Our success is that the RTX 2080 Ti’s performance is already being limited by CPU performance, which means that NAS cannot impact performance further. 

Sadly, on our RTX 2060 Founders Edition we found no notable performance changes. Perhaps this is due to memory-related performance limitations, as the RTX 2060 contains a small 192-bit memory bus, but this would require more testing to confirm. Perhaps NAS offers larger performance gains in other areas of Wolfenstein. 
  
In terms of graphical quality, we noticed no major differences in Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s visuals when MAS is set to Balanced, the feature’s default state. We took screenshots for comparison purposes, but these images are seemingly identical, aside from the framerates they were taken at.