DirectX 11: graphics card performance Full HD
We test at HIGH quality settings. Excited as I was I enabled High quality mode and realized, hardly any card can deal with it in the higher resolutions. Your sweet spot is Medium or if you have a fast enough card that HIGH quality settings and 1080P. For PC gaming your goal always should be 60+ FPS. However, we say 40 FPS for any game should be your minimum threshold, while 60 FPS (frames per second) or higher can be considered optimal.
Processor wise we use tweaked Core i7 5960X (8-cores @ 4.3 GHz). As you can see the game utilizes three threads fully, six a tiny bit and the remaining seven threads are nearly unused. We use the processor on X99 with 16GB quad-channel memory clocked at 2400 MHz.
Above an example of the game rendered at 2560x1440 with an 8GB Radeon RX 480 in High quality modus.
Above you can see resolution scaling versus image quality settings, each step downwards in quality e.g. going from Low to High quality bring significant performance gains. However only the most enthusiast (powerful) card can handle Medium and HIGH Quality settings. All mainstream to high cards are advised to run at Medium quality settings up-to 2560x1440. Believe it or not, above you see the new Radeon RX 480 at work, just look at the lower light blue line and have your eyes browses frown. But let's start the benchmarks at Full HD.
The type of game you play is always relevant though, an first person shooter game is nice at 50 to 60 fps , an online shooter on a 144Hz monitor feels better at 100+ fps. And totally on the opposing side, for RPG gaming things are different for which we are comfortable with an FPS ranging as low as 30~35 FPS. For Mafia III 40 FPS should be your sweet spot minimum. So gaming below 40 FPS is consider to be poor. At all times if your framerate is low, you can opt to change in-game image quality settings. It's the small tweaks herein that will allow you to balance out performance versus image quality settings. Above the most popular and use monitor resolution at 1920x1080 pixels also known as Full HD. We advise a Radeon RX 470 or GeForce GTX 1060 to start with.
Let me clearly state that Mafia III is very tricky to measure. The overall framerate can be off by an extensive amount depending on what location you are in the city, with denser populated and higher buildings in the city center your framerate will be lower to the level as shown in our benchmark charts. Also variables like the weather and even day/night conditions and the car you drive and yes .. traffic can have an effect on performance. When you drive around at night time (in-game like we do in our test) the performance once again takes another hit. Driving in a car eats away deeper in your framerate opposed to walking inside a building. We use a scene where we drive and where the FPS was worst case scenario. So overall your FPS will likely be a nice notch higher, but you will run into situations where the FPS is close to values as shown above.
