Conclusion

As we already assumed on the first page of this, XCOM 2 performance is 100 percent GPU limited. It was actually surprising to see to what extent this is the case. It simply didn’t matter whether we overclocked the CPU, the memory or both at the same time, there was no significant difference. It’s very rare to see such a stable and well optimized game engine, which only scales with either GPU architecture or GPU clock speeds. Actually we’re really curious to see the performance when this engine supports DirectX 12.

In this case it’s apparent to have a look at the performance advantages and disadvantages of different graphics cards. Overall (averaging the results from all resolutions) it was interesting to see that especially the 980 Ti is really pulling away from all the other contenders. It looks like the fully fledged NVIDIA GPU paired up with 6 Gigabyte of VRAM performs very well in combination with the Unreal Engine 3.5. Nevertheless the gap gets smaller the higher the resolution is. In other words this means that the higher memory bandwidth of AMDs Fury cards scores, although the 980 Ti is still the winner in this game. It’s also a bit of a pity, that there are no custom AMD FuryX cards, with massive factory overclocking, since those could make for more interesting competition.

In the case of XCOM 2 deciding for a high-end NVIDIA graphics card really pays off. The 980 Ti performs best by quite a margin. If you’re looking for a budget solution, then AMDs Fury (non-X) is you choice scoring very well. What’s also very interesting to see with this game is that CPU and memory have virtually no influence on the frame rates. Therefore it’s highly advisable to spend your money on a powerful graphics card and not on an expensive CPU or insanely overclocked memory if you want to run highest possible frame rates.

Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Test Setup

Page 3 - GPU Performance Scaling

Page 4 - 1080P CPU / Memory

Page 5 - 1440P CPU / Memory

Page 6 - 2160P CPU / Memory

Page 7 - GPU Prices

Page 8 - Conclusion