Quick test: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Adaptive Shading Benchmarks

A newly released patch for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has been released and interestingly enough, it adds support for NVIDIA Turing's Adaptive Shading. The claims have been enticing, higher performance should be reached with this new technology. 

With adaptive shading, an algorithm looks at the previous frame and then will determine which parts of the current frame can contain less detail without it having noticeable image quality loss (basically where you look with your eyes is shaded the best, the rest a little less). In areas where you hardly look with your eyes shading does not take place per pixel, but per 4 pixels. 

-- Patch info -- A new patch has been deployed to implement NVIDIA Adaptive Shading, improving the performance of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. We’ve been working with NVIDIA to make sure the game runs great on NVIDIA RTX hardware. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus debuts the first implementation of NAS. 

Additional patch notes:

• Added support for NVIDIA Adaptive Shading on NVIDIA RTX series GPUs. (Improves frame rate by dynamically adjusting the shading resolution in different areas of the screen, without affecting fidelity).
• Ensured that, on multiple GPU systems, the discrete GPU is preferred over an integrated GPU.
• Players can now choose to ignore/suppress warnings when the selected video settings exceed the amount of dedicated VRAM available on the GPU
• Fixes for skinning issues on GTX 970

The patch was released yesterday and I decided to see how much of a difference it really makes. In the test results below you can see the performance differences. The test has been conducted on our eight-core Haswell-E platform at 4200 MHz on all cores and a GeForce RTX 2080.  Adaptive shading can be selected in the settings, at several stages. Off, quality, balanced and performance. You can also set a custom profile setting. Since full HD is CPU limited on the GeForce RTX 2080 we skipped that resolution, below 2560x1440 (WQHD) and 3840x2160 (Ultra HD) average framerates measured on a 30 seconds recorded run per preset and resolution.

We can confirm we see very little image quality degradation if you can notice it at all. We rendered at the Mein Leben! preset, customized with adaptive shading. From off to adaptive performance mode you are looking at roughly a 5% performance differential on a game that already is offering breathtaking framerates on any Turing based graphics card. 

And per request, the same result set at a normalized scale: