Doom – 1080p, 1440p and 4K OpenGL Benchmarks
When paired with a 1920×1080, Doom doesn’t really pose a problem for modern graphics cards even on lower-tiered products like the GTX 960 2GB. Surprisingly, the low frame-buffer doesn’t become an issue and every card I tested could achieve a stable 60 frames-per-second average. Clearly, there’s a huge bump in performance when moving to the R9 390 which is what I expected. Interestingly, the R9 390X experiences a good boost compared to the R9 390 although it is way off the GTX 980.
Rather surprisingly, the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC sporting the latest Polaris 10 architecture just edged the R9 Nano. If you own a high-refresh monitor, it’s recommended to select the GTX 1070, Titan X, GTX 980Ti or NVIDIA’s current flagship the GTX 1080. I didn’t expect the GTX 980Ti to have such a noticeable lead over the GTX 1070 given the similar performance in previously tested games. All of these premium graphics cards output ridiculously high numbers and it’s clear that NVIDIA cards fare much better than the competition when using OpenGL.
Once the resolution is increased to 2560×1440, the more budget-friendly offerings struggle and it appears the GTX 960’s frame-buffer inhibits the performance. The Sapphire Nitro R9 380X does pretty well for the price point and you should be able to achieve 60 frames-per-second with a few concessions in the options menu. Additionally, the R9 390 falls just short of 60 frames-per-second while the R9 390X manages to hit this target.
There’s very little to choose between a number of AMD graphics solutions apart from the Fury X which has a commanding lead and outperformed a highly-rated GTX 1060 model. On another note, the GTX 980’s advantage reduces substantially compared to AMD products although it’s still a good margin ahead of the R9 390. The majority of GPUs were able to maintain 60 frames-per-second and the minimum rates remained very consistent. In a similar vein to the 1080p results, high-end NVIDIA graphics cards dominate the top positions but whether it’s worth the extra money is up for discussion since most users will settle for 60 frames-per-second.
During 4K benchmarking, the strenuous preset really takes it toll and only the elite-grade GPUs can even think of getting near 60 frames-per-second. As shown by the data below, the GTX 960 barely completed the benchmark and the R9 380X couldn’t uphold a 30 frames-per-second experience. A large quantity of graphics cards including the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC, GTX 970 and Sapphire R9 390 hovered around the 30 frames-per-second mark.
Furthermore, the R9 390X, R9 Nano and ASUS STRIX GAMING GTX 1060 couldn’t pull away and offered similar performance numbers. On a more positive note, the Fury X almost defeated the Titan X and the frame-rate is relatively playable. The GTX 1070 and GTX 980Ti output similar numbers and provide a major performance enhancement compared to the competition. Saying that. only the GTX 1080 can hit 60 frames-per-second while opting for a 4K monitor.
OMG! What’s wrong with the Titan X? It should perform as the 980 Ti. It got beaten by 390X and just 2-3 fps faster than the $260 RX 480, Lol. Titan X owners must be pissed off right now. BTW, AMD’s mid-range cards’ performance are fantastic, especially the RX 480’s performance.
It shows that when AMD release their HBM Polaris chips things are going to get very interesting.
I have a ASUS R9 290 DCII OC (4GB not the X version) and for the Demo on steam, both Open GL and Vulkan ran flawlessly, max settings with no AA and my FPS never went below 100 except for in the menus. All gameplay was between 100 and 200 fps. How can these numbers for AMD cards be so low?
The benchmarks are run with TSSAA (x8) which is much more demanding than using no AA.
Yes but the Ultra defaults are not as high as the maximum settings i used. Ultra defaults used quite a few High/Medium settings.
LOL.. I have a 290X and Doom Vulkan is with ultra/TSSAA x8 never goes below 120fps and his 200fps. I will record video of this.
290x is the better card, im totally not surprised that it runs that well with AA on, im pretty sure mine would still be around 80-100 with AA on, i just dont need it to enjoy the game, and like with other fast paced shooters, more FPS is better 😀
WoW the 1060 beat the R9 nano just wow.
Nice analysis! Basically it falls in line with what other sites have shown which is AMD cards showing a huge boost while Nvidia cards show a smaller or no boost at all. Since the crashes in Doom are finally fixed I’ve been able to actually play it more on my 1080. I have to say that OpenGL is the better option for my system. With Vulkan I noticed a few areas got a pretty big fps boost but other areas showed a performance decrease when compared to OpenGL. Also, Vulkan has terrible frame-pacing on my PC which causes a constant stutter at the bottom of the screen while moving forward. It’s a deal breaker. Not sure if Vulkan doesn’t play well with G-Sync but it clearly needs work on the Nvidia side. If they can fix the bad stuttering with Vulkan and fix the areas of the game where Vulkan performs worse than OpenGL then it would be perfect. Then if they could get Async Compute working on Pascal cards on top of that I could see the 1080 showing a larger increase in benchmarks. Then again we don’t know if Async will help Pascal cards in all games. We’ll just have to wait and see.
This video might be some help with configuring PresentMon and calculating min/max/ave figures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=7POz3wUtFYw
Amd’s future looks bright with Vulkan and DX12.
dx12?!! the only way DX12 will matter now is if microsoft stops holding it hostage on a windows 10!
Meh Nvdia is still the winner even if they do not benefit that much from those API’s
AMD wins only with a small minority of games
Great analysis. I dont understand one thing, though:
I have a 1070 GPU with a OCed 2500K CPU and get almost constant 120FPS on Ultra @1440p with Vulkan enabled. Your benchmarks are lower than that.
Cheers
I think for Vulkan you should have the RX 400 series graphics cards from AMD for best performance. RX 480 is the perfect choice.
Nvidia has better high end gpus right now both 1070 and 1080 reign supreme with most games
AMD desperately needs Vega…
Excellent analysis. Love your information, it helped me.