Tested: Shadow Warrior 2 sees huge performance boosts from Nvidia’s multi-res shading - griffinhomplasson83

Lo Wang is indorse, pamper. Shadow Warrior 2 ($40 on Steam) launched today and piece its procedurally generated levels give the secret plan a bit less bite than its predecessor, it's still a tumultuously good time in a solid "mindlessly killing demons" sort of way. Simply we covered each that in PCWorld's Shadow Warrior 2 review. This article's dedicated to a span of Shadower Warrior 2's PC "firsts" that are almost more exciting for enthusiasts than the game itself: HDR and Nvidia's multi-resolution shading, and more particularly the latter.

HDR's unequivocal plenty. Shadow Warrior 2 is the first PC halting to embark with high-dynamic lay out support, a feature that can drastically improve the color, lighting, and smartness of a scene. You'll need a progressive graphics card with HDMI 2.0 to support it, along with an HDR-capable TV, As no HDR monitors have trickled onto the market yet. But if you can make the computer hardware stars align, HDR is nothing short of glorious—to my centre, the leap from a non-HDR screen to an HDR screen provides a visual upgrade far exceeding the boost from 1080p to 4K.

Got it? Good. Now onto the truly interesting stuff.

Nvidia multi-res blending

Nvidia's multi-resolution shading (Mrs) has the potential to be a game changer.

I've been saying it ever since I first witnessed MRS every bit part of a virtual realness technical school demo, and I sang the same Song dynast after trying Obduction with MRS enabled when the technology was absorbed into the GeForce GTX 10-series' synchronous multi-projection feature. Now that it's live and in litigate in a orthodox PC game, that potential is becoming reality. Multi-res shading delivers significantcarrying out improvements.

Nvidia's technology was built for VR but adapts well to standard games. MRS divides the screen into individual quadrants. Piece the center of the test (you live, where the action happens) renders at full resolution, MRS scales down the resolution round the edges of the sieve to greatly reduce the workload situated on your graphics card.

Shadow Warrior 2 offers three levels of multi-answer shading: Disabled, Orthodox, and Aggressive. To test out its carrying into action impact, I took the game for a test keep going a PC prejudiced with an overclocked 4.2GHz Nucleus i5-3570K, an EVGA GTX 1080 FTW, and 16GB of Ram down, running the Ultra nontextual matter preset at 2560×1440 firmness of purpose with Nvidia's Shadow Warrior 2 Back Ready 373.06 WHQL driver installed. (Take observe: Nvidia's multi-resoluteness shading tech whole works on GeForce GTX 900-series and GTX 10-serial graphics cards only.)

My numbers were taken from the forested courtyard in the very beginning of the game.

Here's a iridescent of the scene with Nvidia's Mrs. disabled. Standing still, performance fluctuated between 76 and 82 frames per second, per EVGA's PrecisionX overlayer. (Clicking on any of the images in this article will blow them up to full resolution.)

Shadow Warrior 2 allows you to tinker with the multi-res shading stage setting on the fly. Here's the exact same shot with MRS set to Buttoned-up. In fastidious, note the slight loss in quality to the give the axe in the amphetamine-leftfield corner, and the extra jaggies panoptic on the foremost Lio statue retributive underneath the torch. You'll as wel see more aliasing on the edges of the car in the butt-left over corner. None of this was genuinely noticeable with the gage running; I needed to actively seek out the differences in image quality.

But get this: The Conservative Mrs. setting raised frame rates clear to 82fps to 88fps—a roughly 7.5 percent leap that's overmuch more noticeable than the slight image degradation at the edges.

Finally, here's the same picture with MRS set to Self-asserting. The visual tweaks are much more apparent here, with the aliasing jaggies happening the car and lion becoming, intimately, jaggier, and the torch's fire degrading into a spot of pixels. Everything in the midway still looks perfect, though, and performance once once again skyrocketed, all the way to 89fps to 95fps.

That's a huge 14 percent norm frame rate difference compared to the carrying out with multi-res blending disabled. To put that in proper position, Nvidia's GTX 960 is around 14 to 20 percent more efficacious than the lesser-high-powered GTX 950. Enabling Nvidia's Aggressive multi-res shading is like stepping capable a next-level graphics card, for free.

New anathemise.

Running and gunning

That's if you're willing to put upwardly with the visual contrast, of course. Sitting stillness isn't a very effective way of measuring in-motion visual upper-class, soh I spent some time running laps around Phantasm Warrior 2's introductory courtyard, firing a revolving door, and acting equivocal jumps like a madman. While you couldn't discern individual jaggies and pixel blobs like in the screenshot above, the Aggressive MRS planned gave the edges of the screen a softer lineament, which kind of ma like peering into the game through a slight vignette filter. I wouldn't call in it overly distracting, and I'd bet you'd become wont to it later a curtly time, merely the effect is definitely noticeable.

You might be willing to tolerate with it for the performance boost, though. Patc my laps clocked in at a roughly 85fps average with multi-res shading disabled, enabling Vulturous MRS boosted that each the way to the 100fps mark, with occasional dips into the high 90s. Once more: That's immense.

But Conservative Mrs. is the syrupy spot to my oculus. Here's an Nvidia-supplied video ofVestige Warrior 2 running game at 4K solution with Conservative MRS enabled along a GTX 1080.

Enabling it doesn't force the same "soft edge" essence atomic number 3 Aggressive MRS. The cover's edges still look crisp, especially while you're in motion, and you'd have to actively assay forbidden flaws to notice the quality change. But Hidebound MRS still provides a big supercharge to public presentation, rearing the mediocre frame charge per unit during my courtyard laps to the low- to mid-90s. That's enough of a push to help modest cards hit such more acceptable frame rates, or maybe even allow you to crowd the game's graphics settings up a notch.

Loaning credence thereto thought, Nvidia's own carrying out benchmarks show up that enabling Conservative MRS in Shadow Warrior 2 is sufficiency to push the GTX 1060 complete 60fps at 1440p result, and to permit the beastly GTX 1080 to flirt with 60fps at 4K. Enabling Aggressive MRS pushes the GTX 1080 fully over the hump.

Radeon gamers are sure to shriek at the inclusion of this GeForce-proprietary GameWorks tech, but the numbers don't lie. Nvidia's multi-resolution shading can unlock meaningful performance gains even if you wear't put the bicycle to the metal. I hope Shadow Warrior 2's MRS inclusion body is the start of a beautiful trend, preferably than a one-off gift to GeForce owners.

And speech production of one-off gifts to GeForce owners, Nvidia wants to push this technology out to the hoi polloi. The troupe's bounteous away $50,000 worth of Shadow Warrior 2 game codes (operating room 1,250 copies) to registered GeForce Experience 3.0 users advanced this calendar month, following in the footsteps of an in the beginning promotion that dished out $200,000 meriting of At rest by Daylight codes to GFE users. Birth an email speech W. C. Handy.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410683/tested-shadow-warrior-2-sees-huge-performance-boosts-from-nvidias-multi-res-shading.html

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