Wolfenstein: Youngblood System Requirements, Setup, Benchmarks, and Performance Analysis
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Wolfenstein: Youngblood is here, proving once again that few villains are worse than Nazis. Throw in another dimension, where WWII didn’t end as we knew it, a frantic co-op twin sisters, and you have the chance to wreak more Nazi sabotage. Enemies level up with the player, starting with basic varieties and eventually progressing to cyborgs and mechs that spew flames and fart laser beams. The only thing missing – and this should change in the near future – is ray-traced Nazi annihilation. It’s coming, and just released a new trailer at Gamescom…but Bethesda has yet to commit to an official release date.
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That’s a shame, especially for owners of high-end Nvidia RTX graphics cards, as the performance of the RTX card is high enough that a modest drop in frame rate to enhance the graphics may be justified. Also, given the performance we’ll see later, I’d expect Vulkan-based ray tracing calculations to end up being more optimized than what we’ve seen from DirectX ray tracing (DXR) games, I’ll also be looking at CPU scaling and laptop performance .
I’ll revisit ray tracing performance after the patch, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at Wolfenstein: Youngblood and release/early performance, starting with a quick feature overview.
(Image credit: Future)
Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s list of PC features looks almost identical to Rage 2 — which isn’t surprising since both were published by Bethesda. The aspect ratio is basically valid, and the game’s green, and the ultra-wide 21:9 cutscenes look good (with letterboxing on a 16:9 monitor). If you’re one of the few people with a double-width 32:9 aspect ratio display, you’ll have black bars for the UI and cutscenes, but there aren’t really that many cutscenes, so it’s not a big deal.
The only unsupported real feature we’d like to see is modding. It’s sad considering the history of modding owes a lot to id Software’s early days, and what’s worse is the increasingly common trend across all major games to skip modding support. But everything else has a green checkmark.
The good news is that pretty much anyone with a PC should be able to at least play Youngblood, but if you’re running an Intel integrated graphics or potato PC, you’ll probably want to drop down to 720p, minimum quality, no antialiasing, and 50% resolution Scaled to achieve above 30fps. For dedicated graphics cards, even a GTX 1050 or RX 560 (or similar hardware) can hit 50-60 fps at low presets, and RX 570 4GB and above can hit 60 fps even at 1080p and max settings or higher — or, in Wolfenstein’s parlance, “my life!” quality.
Hit 60fps or higher at 1440p Mein Leben! (RX 580 8GB or Nvidia’s GTX 1070 and above) and 4K Mein Leben! (RX 5700 or RTX 2060 and above) is also possible, with a resolution of 1440p or 4K – however, you’ll need something more powerful to keep above the minimum 60 fps.
(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)
Wolfenstein: Youngblood system requirements
The official Wolfenstein: Youngblood system requirements are fairly reasonable, but there is no mention of target performance. The following are the minimum and recommended hardware provided by Bethesda:
at the lowest limit
• Operating System: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 (64-bit version)
• Processor: AMD FX-8350/Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i5-3570/i7-3770
• Memory: 8GB RAM
• Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 770 4GB/GTX 1650 or AMD equivalent
• Storage: 40 GB free space
recommended
• Operating System: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 (64-bit version)
• Processor: AMD FX-9370/Ryzen 5 1600X or Intel Core i7-4770
• Memory: 16GB RAM
• Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB/RTX 2060 or AMD equivalent
• Storage: 40GB free space
The specs above are a bit odd, and there’s a note about AMD drivers no longer supporting Windows 8.1, so…if you’re still using Windows 8.1 and an AMD GPU, I’m guessing you’re out of luck. From my testing, you should be able to run Youngblood on much lower hardware than the officially supported hardware, and the above requirements may get you close to 60fps or more at 1080p low, while the recommended settings should break out at max settings 60fps.
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Minimum quality, no AA (Image credit: Bethesda)
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Low preset (Image credit: Bethesda)
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Medium preset (Image credit: Bethesda)
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High preset (Image credit: Bethesda)
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Ultra presets (Image credit: Bethesda)
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Uber presets (Image credit: Bethesda)
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My music book! Presets (Image credit: Bethesda)
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Wolfenstein: Youngblood Setup Overview
In terms of settings, Wolfenstein: Youngblood clearly believes that more is more. or better. any. There are six graphics presets (Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Ultra, and My Life!), and 27 advanced graphics settings (up to 30, depending on how you want to count). It may take some time to get everything set up, or I can simply refer to the chart above for a quick overview of performance starting with Mein Leben! Presets, then turn each individual option down to minimum.
Actually, in many cases, the difference in image quality is not that big. There are also some default settings that are clearly “wrong” – for example, GPU culling says it should be on on AMD GPUs and off on Nvidia cards, but performance is better on AMD with it disabled (and it doesn’t seem to help or hurt Nvidia). Also note that while Youngblood supports Nvidia’s adaptive shading, turning it on (requires a Turing GPU, so GTX 16-series or RTX 20-series) also turns off deferred rendering. I end up with slightly better performance if you disable adaptive shading and enable deferred rendering. YMMV.
As far as presets go – including my own “minimal” option to turn off antialiasing, motion blur, and directional occlusion – overall image fidelity does improve, but not by much. The lowest quality shows a lot of aliasing and less shadows, while the low preset “fixes” both.Increase shadow quality and quantity from low to medium, and the change from medium to high to ultra is Very slight. Uber slightly improved some distant textures, and Mein Leben! Take the shadow level up a notch. You can see some screenshots in the gallery above, but the difference becomes less noticeable in motion.
Aside from using presets, most advanced settings alone will only change performance by 1-3%. On Nvidia’s RTX 2060, shadow, reflection, water qualityand volume mass is the largest item to be adjusted.For AMD’s RX 5700 it’s almost the same but disabled GPU culling Also worth considering. While antialiasing can have a modest performance hit, I usually leave it alone – I also keep sharpening at 2.0, as lowering it does make things blurry.
Tested Nvidia graphics cards
Tested AMD graphics cards
Tested laptops and motherboards
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Wolfenstein: Youngblood Graphics Benchmark
PC GAMER WOLFENSTEIN: YOUNGBLOOD TEST BED
Since Wolfenstein: Youngblood doesn’t have its own benchmarking tool, all benchmark data was recorded while playing the game – specifically, I started with Detention Zone 4 (see video above), took out a large mech and Some other enemies ran back down the street before coming back. Each GPU was tested multiple times, and I used median results, but the variability in battle made performance fluctuate more between runs. Basically, considering that my Youngblood benchmark has a margin of error close to 3%.
Unless otherwise noted, all GPU testing was done with an MSI graphics card using an overclocked Intel Core i7-8700K and an MSI Z390 Godlike motherboard. AMD Ryzen CPUs were tested on MSI’s X470 Gaming M7, and the new Ryzen 3000 parts were tested on an X570 Godlike. MSI is our partner in the production of these videos and provides the hardware and sponsorship to make them happen. These include three gaming laptops (GL63, GS75, and GE75), though I’ll get into more of these later.
For these tests I used low, high and mein leben! The presets are 1080p, 1440p and 4K tested at highest quality only. I also did some testing at 720p with Intel and AMD integrated graphics, which requires different motherboards and CPUs (which makes sense since the Godlike boards don’t have a video output for integrated graphics). I tested with Nvidia’s 431.60 driver, and AMD’s 19.7.5 driver (as 19.7.3 and 19.7.4 have been crashing on the new RX 5700 ‘Navi’ GPU).
(Image credit: Future)
Wolfenstein: Youngblood looks pretty good, even at low quality – although it definitely looks worse down to the lowest settings. Not surprisingly, even at 720p, Intel’s HD Graphics 630 struggled, but AMD’s Vega 11 (Ryzen 5 2400G) topped 60fps. The Vega 11 is also available at 1080p lows, dropping down to the 20s periodically. For Intel graphics, you basically need to minimize everything and enable 50% resolution scaling, which does look blocky. Even so, the average fps is still only 33, and the minimum fps is 24. It’s technically playable, but not very fun.
The thing is, any modest dedicated graphics card over the past few years can make a huge difference. A GTX 1050 or RX 560 will average almost 60fps, while older/slower GPUs should still easily top 30fps. Even at the low preset, you’ll get a warning message about lack of VRAM on any GPU with 2GB of memory or less, but I was still able to run around on the GTX 1050 and play Youngblood without issue. For super quality and above, if your memory is less than 6GB, you will also get a message about VRAM, but again 6GB is enough, even 4GB cards will work fine.
As far as AMD and Nvidia GPUs go, the RTX cards handily beat previous-generation GTX cards, and the GTX 16-series cards outperformed other games as well. I suspect Youngblood is a good mix of integer and FP computations, where Turing architecture can improve performance. For Nvidia’s GTX 10-series and earlier parts, AMD’s counterparts are almost universally faster, and sometimes quite large. For example, the RX 570 4GB is about 10% better than the 1060 6GB, and the Vega 56 is just ahead of the GTX 1080. AMD’s new RX 5700 cards also performed well, with the 5700 XT averaging nearly 240fps. For 144Hz monitors, the GTX 1070 and above will maximize refresh rates, but a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor is still recommended to smooth dips and avoid tearing.
(Image credit: Future)
The medium preset doesn’t change much from low quality, so I’ll bump up to 1080p high next. In general, this reduces performance by about 15-20% compared to the low preset, although cards with less than 4GB of VRAM may show larger increments. For a 60fps average, a GTX 1060 3GB and above should suffice, but note that the GTX 970 (which is a 3.5GB card due to segmented memory) will end up being faster. This isn’t usually the case, which again highlights how much Youngblood loves VRAM.
To get a minimum fps above 60, you need an R9 390 or faster. Graphics cards in the 75-144fps range like the RX 570 are great if you have a FreeSync or G-Sync 144Hz monitor, but if you want to max out the 144Hz refresh rate, you’ll need at least a GTX 1080/1660 Ti or RX Vega 56. However, if you want to get a minimum higher than 144, only the Radeon VII and above will suffice. Also worth noting is how good AMD’s RX 5700 graphics card is, the 5700 XT actually beat the Radeon VII and RTX 2070.
I haven’t had any of MSI’s RTX Super models to test, so I’ve left them out, but the cards won’t change much – the 2060 Super is a little slower than the 2070, the 2070 Super is just a little bit below the 2080, and the 2080 Super is just around the corner above 2080. …
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