GPU-Benchmarks 2020+: Results & Recap

The results: 20 games & overall

Since 2019, the PCGH Performance Chart includes the UWQHD resolution with 3.440 × 1.440 pixels - something that is still rarely found in online media. UWQHD bridges the gap between 1.920 × 1.080 (Full HD), 2.560 × 1.440 (WQHD) and 3.840 × 2.160 (Ultra HD). Thus, we're testing the four most common resolutions. All valid values end up in our powerful "Indexcel", which uses them to calculate the performance index. As before, we normalize the values so that a game with small FPS numbers has the same weight as one with large numbers. As a result, each of the 20 games is included in the overall index with five percent (100/20 = 5). In addition to the average value, which determines the performance index, we also record these percentiles for separate calculation.

What a wall of text - time for benchmark bars! In the following we go into each of the 20 tests, explain the technical basis as well as the detailed settings and results.

Source: PC Games Hardware GPU Benchmarks 2020/2021 (+ Bonus Tests)

Anno 1800

Engine: Recent iteration of the RD Engine with DX12 support
Characteristics: Highly CPU-bound in most cases, MSAA support
Detail settings: Maxed out with 8× MSAA & FidelityFX CAS
Benchmark sequence: Selected to be completely GPU-bound

Due to its continuing popularity among PCGH readers, the build-up game from Germany is still included in the benchmark mix for 2020/2021. To challenge the graphics cards, we now test the GPU's in the New World and tackle the stubborn CPU limit with a new and idyllic test scene: "Puertonova" is significantly more processor-friendly than our older "Bright Sands" scene and scales perfectly with GPU performance, not only thanks to 8× MSAA. The game's fine geometry is thus perfectly smoothed. A look at the numbers reveals that Anno 1800 runs best on Geforce GPU's (and Intel CPU's, but that's another story).

Battlefield 5

Engine: DICE's Frostbite Engine with DX12 and DXR support
Characteristics: Nice and very well-performing graphics
Detail settings: "Ultra", Future Frame Rendering disabled, DX12
Benchmark sequence: GPU-bound Singleplayer War Story

Battlefield 5 is the only game in the new benchmark mix besides Metro Exodus that we continue to test on the new system without any changes. This includes the use of the DirectX 12 API without Future Frame Rendering (FFR) in order to get the most direct, minimal input latency possible. DX12 helps to lift every GPU's performance, after the game has cached all necessary data in the first few minutes. Our benchmark scene "Tirailleur" (Provence) is more graphics-heavy than "The Last Tiger", with which we test CPU's, and reveals a strong Radeon performance.

Black Mesa

Engine: Enhanced Source Engine based on DirectX 9
Characteristics: Modern lighting, therefore no more MSAA support
Detail settings: "Ridiculous" (max. possible detail)
Benchmark sequence: Final, GPU-intensive boss fight (spoiler!)

Half-Life (1998) is considered one of the most influential and best first-person shooters of all time. Since its developer Valve has not yet attempted a remake or reboot, fans took up the idea. Black Mesa is a fantastic, contentwise careful remake, which lets new players experience what older gamers are always raving about. Graphically, the game scores with nice textures, but cannot always hide the age of its engine. Our test scene, the final boss battle (!), is extremely GPU-heavy due to many effects. Geforce graphics card do best.

Borderlands 3

Engine: Unreal Engine 4 in optimized shape
Characteristics: Hand-tuned, good DirectX 12 implementation
Detail settings: Maxed out, native render resolution
Benchmark sequence: Indoor scene with high GPU load

Borderlands 3 is one of two benchmark games featuring the omnipresent Unreal Engine 4. Gearbox' wacky loot shooter has been available since autumn 2019, and for a few months now also on Steam. The maturing time with numerous patches has helped to fix many (performance) issues, meanwhile the optional DirectX 12 mode has proven to be the best choice on most PC's. A processor limit is thus practically eliminated. For indoor applications - like our GPU benchmark scene in the spaceship "Sanctuary III" - the only thing that counts is graphics performance due to many shader effects.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Engine: Recent IW Engine (8.0), DX12-only
Characteristics: Optional RT shadows, high performance
Detail settings: Maxed out (without RTX), Filmic SMAA T2X
Benchmark sequence: Fiery outdoor area in London

After Black Ops 4 replaced the single-player mode with a battle royale experiment, the Modern Warfare remake (2019) once again offers a bombastically staged story. Technically there is nothing to complain about, CoD MW addresses less graphics memory than its "greedy" predecessors and can be optionally enhanced with raytracing shadows. The performance of the renderer, which works exclusively with DirectX 12, is basically high, although we use a demanding test sequence. The FPS values can also be transferred to determine the performance of the multiplayer mode Call of Duty Warzone.

Control

Engine: Remedy's Northlight Engine, optional DX12
Characteristics: Optional, beautiful full-scene Raytracing
Detail settings: Maxed out (without RTX and DLSS)
Benchmark sequence: Very demanding for every GPU

When Max Payne's parents release a new game, expectations are high. In fact, the mystery action title Control exceeds almost all of them. The graphics are already pretty without raytracing, but with active RTX effects and DLSS 2.0, the game is simply stunningly beautiful - as long as the (Turing) GPU can cope with it. Of course we compare the different IHV's graphics cards without raytracing. DirectX 12 is used all the time, except for old Maxwell chips and generally models with only 4 GiB of graphics memory. We use DirectX 11 for these, because otherwise texture details are missing.

Death Stranding

Engine: Customized Decima Engine, needs DX12 feature level 12_0
Characteristics: Excellent performance, favours RDNA GPU's
Detail settings: Maxed out with TAA (no DLSS/CAS upscaling)
Benchmark sequence: Particle worstcase near a waterfall

Death Stranding was released on July 14th - and was thus firmly scheduled as a last-minute addition to the new GPU benchmark mix. The excitingly staged end-time game from Kojima Productions did not disappoint us: The landscape is beautiful, the character depiction even groundbreaking - and the performance is pleasingly high. The game uses the Decima engine from the Dutch Guerrilla Games, which created Horizon: Zero Dawn. The latter was finally released for the PC on August 7th, which gives double weight to the Death Stranding benchmarks. Almost every GPU performs well, except Nvidia's Pascal architecture. Its frametimes become more and more irregular the closer you get to the waterfall of our benchmark sequence.

Desperados 3

Engine: Unity Engine (v2018.x)
Characteristics: Very high performance, no Temporal AA
Detail settings: Maxed out - with 200 % render scale
Benchmark sequence: The most GPU-demanding mission ("The Glorious Five")

A few weeks ago Desperados 3 was released, which is probably the best stealth game of the past years. The Munich-based Mimimi Games took everything that made Shadow Tactics great and packaged it in a humorous yet rough Wild West ambience. The game uses the Unity engine, which is particularly popular with smaller game developers. In case of Desperados 3 the engine paints very fluid, quite CPU-intensive graphics on screen. By using in-game downsampling, we not only achieve a high GPU load, but also perfectly smoothed edges - with 200 % resolution per axis, every GPU works within a hard power limit. By the way, the benchmark name is not a typo, but creative intention.

Detroit: Become Human

Engine: In-house engine from Quantic Dream (Vulkan-only)
Characteristics: Framelimit disabled via config.xml
Detail settings: Maxed out, FidelityFX CAS enabled
Benchmark sequence: Open area with high load

You might think we are presenting the "Playstation 4 charts" - well, it's something like that. Detroit: Become Human is another former PS4 exclusive game that has found its way onto the PC. Initially Epic-exclusive, Steam's customers are now also being served. Set in 2038, the game has a strong narrative focus, with facial expressions, gestures and decisions playing a major role - this is absolutely worth a try. For the benchmarks of the Vulkan-powered title, we rely on a beautiful outdoor area and activate all details including the AMD FidelityFX sharpening function, which was patched in some months ago.

Doom Eternal

Engine: id Tech 7.1.1 (Vulkan-only)
Characteristics: Fluent as hell - but needs 8 GiB of VRAM for max. details
Detail settings: Maxed out ("Ultra-Nightmare"), if possible*
Benchmark sequence: Choreography in the "Super Gore Nest"

Fluid, more fluid, Doom Eternal: The ratio of quality and frame rate delivered by id Software's newest game is unrivaled. While almost every processor in recent years can achieve triple-digit frame rates, every shader unit on the graphics card side is converted to higher FPS. If you have a GPU model with less than 8 GiByte of memory, you are not allowed to switch on all (texture) details - nothing can be done about it. We're benchmarking with "Ultra Nightmare" details as standard and only reduce the texture pool size on graphic cards with less than 8 GiByte.

*GTX 980 Ti: Texture pool size only Nightmare/Ultra due to lack of VRAM.

F1 2020

Engine: Recent iteration of Codemasters' EGO engine
Characteristics: DX12 allows for more effects and performance
Detail settings: Maxed out (if possible*), FidelityFX CAS enabled
Benchmark sequence: Monaco in sunshine

With F1 2020 the famous racing game series from Codemasters enters a new round. Worth mentioning are the revised career mode, which now also includes management functions, as well as the 2-player split-screen mode - this is a rarity on the PC. Technically, "evolution instead of revolution" applies, which is okay considering the nice graphics. Like its predecessors, the game allows additional smoke effects with DirectX 12 and also runs better with the lower-level API. We test the most GPU-bound combination of track and weather: Monaco in sunshine.

*AMD GPU's without blended tire trails.

Forza Horizon 4

Engine: Forzatech engine Horizon branch (Forward+, DX12)
Characteristics: MSAA support, UWP application
Detail settings: Maxed out with 8× MSAA + FXAA
Benchmark sequence: Circuit race with high GPU load

Forza Horizon 4 is still probably the best arcade racing game on PC and pretty to look at, so it's allowed to join the new benchmark setup. FH4 is still exclusively available via the Windows Store and uses DirectX 12. In order to also challenge upcoming GPU's, we switch to 8× instead of 4× MSAA (plus FXAA), while the demanding test race is unchanged. Compared to mid-2019, Nvidia has caught up through driver enhancements, but overall the performance of all graphics cards with more than 4 GiBytes of memory is good.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

Engine: Ubisoft's recent iteration of Anvilnext (2.0)
Characteristics: Very demanding for both CPU and GPU, depending on the settings
Detail settings: Maxed out, no Temporal Injection, Vulkan-API*
Benchmark sequence: Motocross-Fahrt über Stock und Stein

Ghost Recon Breakpoint divides the gamer community. The game's world "Auroa" is too empty, the missions are interchangeable. Nevertheless, GR Breakpoint shows the technical direction in which Assassin's Creed Valhalla & Co. will move. Ubisoft has heard the criticism and has added new content since the release of the game, also technically: Since version 2.0, Ghost Recon Breakpoint supports the lower-level API Vulkan. This not only results in better FPS when CPU-bound, but also smoothes GPU frametimes. We are testing with maximum details without checkerboarding (Temporal Injection), which mainly affects GPU's with less than 8 GiByte of VRAM. Only Maxwell GPU's are tested with DirectX 11, otherwise performance and texture quality are suffering.

*GTX 980 Ti/Maxwell: DX11 achieves better performance (lack of VRAM using Vulkan)

Greedfall

Engine: Silk Engine (derived from Sony's Phyre Engine)
Characteristics: Great TAA, but quite bumpy animations
Detail settings: Maxed out, native rendering resolution
Benchmark sequence: GPU worstcase with dense vegetation

The RPG Greedfall is one of last year's surprises and undoubtely the best game of the French developer Spiders. The mixture of Dragon Age and Risen seems a bit unpolished in places, but the interesting game world and the great voice acting are convincing. Greedfall can also please graphically, especially with its texture resolution, lighting and the effective, hardly blurred Temporal-AA. We benchmark die GPU's in a forest with rich vegetation, which draws a common GPU worstcase.

Metro Exodus

Engine: Recent iteration of the 4A Engine with great DX12
Characteristics: Optional raytracing and DLSS 1.x, very GPU-bound
Detail settings: Ultra details (not Extreme!), Hairworks & Advanced PhysX enabled
Benchmark sequence: Extremely GPU-heavy outdoor scene

Metro Exodus is the only game besides Battlefield 5 that we are testing exactly like last year. Metro Exodus uses a variety of Nvidia features, including Hairworks as well as PhysX effects, and offers a graphically impressive, yet very expensive ray-tracing global illumination on compatible Nvidia graphics cards. We continue to use the "Ultra" detail preset instead of "Extreme" - even the upcoming, much faster Ampere and RDNA 2 GPU's couldn't handle high resolutions with the highest setting. All in all, the performance looks good, but Metro Exodus is greedy for compute power.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Engine: Recent Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE)
Characteristics: Extraordinary detailed, prefers Radeon GPU's
Detail settings: Everything set to "High/On" (except MSAA/FXAA = off), only textures "Ultra"
Benchmark sequence: Foggy swamp scene -> GPU worstcase

With Red Dead Redemption 2 another ex-console exclusive arrived at the PC. Never before the Wild West has looked so good, no other game world boasts so many details. But all of this isn't for free: RDR2 is one of the few games that we don't test with maximum quality - even upcoming GPU's would be overwhelmed in higher resolutions. Instead, we set everything to "high" and only the textures to "ultra". According to PCGH tests, the Vulkan API achieves the best framerates on average, which is why we're using it for all GPU's.

Resident Evil 3

Engine: Recent RE Engine with great DX12 support
Characteristics: Nice performance even on older/cheaper graphics cards
Detail settings: Maxed out, DX12 - with 150 % render scale
Benchmark sequence: Extraordinary GPU- and VRAM-heavy

Resident Evil 3 (2020) takes the place of Resident Evil 2 (2019) from the previous benchmark setup. As before, Capcom's quite young RE engine ("REach for the moon") is used. The new graphics engine replaces the old MT framework (e.g. in Monster Hunter World) and now always runs better under DX12 than under DX11 - the Resident Evil 2 remake was not yet as consistent in this respect. Our benchmark scene is very demanding, especially since we test with 150 % render resolution. Graphics cards with 6 GiByte therefore struggle with the amount of data, while models with 8 GiB can handle the test up to WQHD. Above this resolution, 11+ GiByte are recommended.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Engine: Unreal Engine 4 in typical (DirectX 11) shape
Characteristics: CPU-bound in many cases due to weak multi-threading
Detail settings: Maxed out, Framelimit disabled via Config
Benchmark sequence: GPU-heavy area on Kashyyyk

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the second benchmark game based on Epic's famous Unreal Engine 4. It is used in countless new game releases without manual optimization or DX12 support and is represented as such in the PCGH benchmark setup by SWJ Fallen Order. "The best Star Wars game since Jedi Knight", quote from user reviews, sells like hot cakes, which is why we chose this specific UE4/DX11 combination. Our test sequence takes place on the planet Kashyyyk, where we deliberately look in a less CPU-intensive direction to get higher FPS differences between the GPU's. Despite all the Ryzen tuning effort, the game is still very CPU-bound, which is why the simulated "Geforce RTX 2080 Ultra" can't escape the Ti in Full HD.

The Witcher 3

Engine: Red Engine 3 from CD Projekt (DirectX 11)
Characteristics: Huge graphical facelift via PCGH Config & texture mod
Detail settings: PCGH "Epic" + HD Reworked Project 11
Benchmark sequence: GPU worstcase in one of Toussaint's beautiful forests

Witcher Geralt is one of our oldest benchmark companions, since 2015 we have been testing The Witcher 3 with changing scenes and detail settings. For 2020/2021 we have again tightened the conditions: The PCGH config file now offers the settings "Epic" and "Wicked" with more or less increased visibility and grass density, better shading and denser hair. In addition, we're using Halk Hogan's newest texture mod to squeeze everything out of CD Projekt's evergreen until Cyberpunk 2077 finally arrives. Last but not least, the test sequence is also new: We now ride through a Toussaintian forest towards the evening sun, which is without a doubt a GPU worstcase.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Engine: Modified Cryengine with DirectX 11
Characteristics: Very GPU-bound - and still playable on older GPU's
Detail settings: Maxed out including SMAA 1TX
Benchmark sequence: GPU worstcase due to many effects

Looking at the market as a whole, Cryengine is not very widespread, but it is currently being used more often. Apart from Hunt: Showdown, the game engine also powers Crysis Remastered, which will be released soon. In the heavily Diablo-inspired Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem (formerly "Umbra"), a modified cryengine shows off a great quality/performance ratio. We test in the very GPU-heavy prologue, which nearly shows the full effect spectrum. 4 GiByte of graphics memory are sufficient in Wolcen, but the game can never have enough computing power for higher resolutions.

GPU Performance Charts 2020/2021

After all these numbers, it is time for the final and overall rankings. What are the effects of the new games, which microarchitectures win, which ones lose and does the overall picture look "right" in the end? First looks at the development since 2018 show that our plan has worked out: Almost all graphics cards lose performance in relation to the fastest model, which means we're working within a hard GPU limit. The only exception to this rule is the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (and her little sister), which catches up to the Turing boards. These are good signs for Navi 2X aka RDNA 2 - the imminent duel with Nvidia's Ampere will be highly exciting.

It will be just as exciting to see to what extent our benchmark setup can withstand significantly stronger GPU's. All scenes and settings are deliberately chosen to include a buffer for this purpose. No matter how you look at it, the relatively antique Full HD is so undemanding for high-end graphics cards in comparison to WQHD (and higher) that we will test in a partial CPU limit. The final performance of Nvidia's Gamer Ampere and AMD's Big Navi will decide how severe this problem is. If these chips work more than 50 percent faster, these graphics cards are more or less slowed down on any infrastructure. However, since we are talking about high-end GPU's, we can easily look at the three higher resolutions in our benchmark set. In any case PCI-Express 4.0 is available to support the new GPU giants in the best possible way.

Conclusion

The preparatory work is done, the new GPU Performance Chart is ready. Now there is nothing left to do but to eagerly await the new GPUs. The already available models place themselves roughly where we know them from last year, but the positive development of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (and thus also the RX 5700) is remarkable. On average, the Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super is still the faster graphics card, but the lead is crumbling. If one integrates the price into the consideration, a cheap Radeon RX 5700 XT (US-$ ~390/€ ~360) delivers significantly more bang for the buck than a Geforce RTX 2070 Super (US-$ ~500/€ ~480). However, the latter scores with its special functions like raytracing and DLSS image reconstruction - you decide whether that's worth it. Both graphics cards deliver a strong performance for super-smooth Full HD, great WQHD and even well usable ultra-wide QHD. Only players with an Ultra-HD display should look for faster graphics cards to experience smooth frame rates. That's a problem that "RTX 3000" and "RX 6000" maybe can solve.

Looking at the older graphics cards, frame rates do not look as good. The still popular Radeon RX Vega 56, Geforce GTX 1070 and Geforce GTX 980 Ti obviously have a hard time keeping up in our modern gaming benchmarks. Especially the GTX 980 Ti struggles, even though the five year old Maxwell card has aged outstandingly overall. If you compare these graphics cards with a Radeon RX 5700 XT or Geforce RTX 2070 Super, huge performance differences come to light. Attractive models for upgrading are thus undoubtedly available, but not every PC gamer likes their prices. If you want to save a few bucks, it's best to go for a Radeon RX 5700 (US-$ ~330/€ ~330) or Geforce RTX 2060 Super (US-$ ~340/€ ~370). We strongly advise against any smaller model with 6 GiByte of memory, as these are already not sufficient for all games and scenarios. Upcoming cross-platform games tuned for Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X will further increase the demands - and nobody upgrades his or her GPU to lower details right away.

Last but not least, let's have a look at an older duel: Geforce GTX 970 (2014) versus Radeon R9 390 (2015). The latter gained our "best bang for the buck" award for a long time, while we recommended the GTX 970 in terms of efficiency. Five years ago, Nvidia's controversially discussed Maxwell model performed well, but over the years, not much has remained of it. With every new GPU benchmark setup, the Geforce GTX 970 falls further behind. Whoever still plays with a Radeon R9 390 will notice - probably a bit astonished - that he is still allowed to set all texture details in modern games and still doesn't experience significant stutter. The Geforce GTX 970 instead can't handle this, its segmented memory and the total capacity of 4 GiByte don't meet the demands of modern Triple-A games like Doom Eternal, Red Dead Redemption 2, Resident Evil 3 & Co. If you're still using one of these GPU's, it can be worthwhile to invest around 350 euro in a current model in order to have a few years of peace and quiet again.

In a few weeks, we'll all know how the next-gen GPU's will master the new benchmarks. Of course you will find out at PCGH which IHV and which GPU will win the game. But for now: Have fun studying the benchmarks! As always, constructive feedback is explicitly desired, no matter if praise or blame.

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GPU Performance Test 2020/2021: 20 games, 15 GPU's, 4 resolutions - in-depth benchmarking After deep-diving into our testing methodology, you can enjoy all the GPU benchmark results on the second page of the article.

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1. Page 1 GPU-Benchmarks 2020+: Methodology
2. Page 2 GPU-Benchmarks 2020+: Results & Recap