Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Laptop And Desktop Benchmarks

Unlike the id Tech 5 powered first iteration released in 2014, Wolfenstein II is based on the brand-new id Tech 6 engine that we’ve already seen in Doom. The new engine is at eye level with the kings of the hill Frostbite (DICE) and CryEngine (Crytek), and compared to Wolfenstein: The New Order the level of details has been improved to a great extent.

The levels dominated by shop floors, bunkers, and destroyed outside areas are full of minor ornamental objects such as rubble, debris, pieces of furniture, and other tchotchkes; it makes you wonder how much time and effort must have been spent on designing these levels. Texture quality is first-class most of the time, and noticeably better than in id Tech 5 games. The effects (explosions, beams, or muzzle flashes) have also been refined visibly, and affectionately designed characters and high-quality cutscenes are the icing on the cake.

That said, gameplay was somewhat disappointing and we would have expected more. While it can easily keep up with the likes of Call of Duty when it comes to action, abundance of weaponry, and hit feedback (read: blood) we would have preferred more varied combat and more oomph in general. In the author’s personal opinion, the recently released Destiny 2 offers a much more sophisticated and satisfying gunplay. Nevertheless, Machine Games did a great job and 44 GB of required storage space (as of October 2017) are acceptable.

The very elaborate and extensive graphics menu is worthy of praise in particular. The main tab includes settings such as brightness, resolution, windowed/full screen mode, vertical synchronization, and motion blur, but the advanced menu is where the action takes place and where a total of 28 (!) different settings can be fiddled with. Some can be adjusted in various steps and some require a restart, which can be very frustrating due to the unskippable intro videos typical for games published by Bethesda.

Antialiasing settings are extensive, and in addition to the usual post-processing effects (FXAA, SMAA, and TAA) that won’t cause a noticeable performance hit but at the same time won’t do the best of jobs either (unless you combine them with 1TX) the game also supports the rather demanding TSSAA.

All settings are explained in a few words. Several presets ranging from “Low” to - and we are not kidding here - “Mein Leben!” are available for the more impatient among us that are not too interested in technicalities. The benchmarks were performed with the Low, Medium, High, and Extreme presets selected.

• On some devices, Wolfenstein II selected a low resolution when first started or after connecting an external (4K) display, and failed to scale the image appropriately. We already ran into this issue in other Bethesda games, such as Prey and Dishonored 2, and it usually helps to adjust scaling in Windows 10 to 100 %.
• When switching between presets, antialiasing was reset to the highest possible level every single time. We are unsure at this point whether this is an actual bug or simply a terrible decision by the developers.
• When launching the game, loading a scene, or switching resolution the game tended to crash on some systems. For example, the game froze every time on low-end GPUs such as Intel’s HD Graphics 630 or Nvidia’s GeForce MX150 (not enough VRAM maybe?). At the other end of the spectrum, our notebook equipped with a GTX 1080 crashed every time we connected an external display.
• Depending on graphics and in particular antialiasing settings, some characters suffer from extreme hair flicker.