Yesterday Felix's ageing rig Jerry hit the wall while trying to run Wolfenstein: The New Order. The Radeon HD 6670 put up a fight but still came up a little short, leading us to worry how well the trusty Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 would perform in the same tests. 

Wolfenstein: The New Order runs off the very same id Tech 5 engine that powered Rage, and as such we expected all the minor problems that plagued that engine to crop up here, and we were right. It's certainly not the most stable of engines and it's got its fair share of graphical oddities, but with that in mind we put the GeForce GTX 650 2GB with AMD FX 4100 and 4GB RAM to the test...

Felix went over the Wolfenstein: The New Order graphics setting screen in significant detail during his Radeon HD 6670 benchmarks, so I won't bore you with the details but you can check them out for yourself here. For these benches we ran through the same gameplay segment fighting in the trenches during the opening level of Wolfenstein 2014, tracking average frame rates across 1280x720, 1600x900, and 1920x1080 resolutions - at Low, Medium, High, and attempted Ultra graphics settings.

Benchmarks for Wolfenstein: The New Order performed on a AMD FX 4100 with 4GB RAM and Nvidia GeForce 650 2GB graphics card

As you can see the trusty old Nvidia GTX 650 performed pretty admirably in these benchmarks, remaining playable for almost all of it. One key takeaway from these benchmarks is that graphics quality had a tiny impact in comparison to resolution changes. Switching from Low to High graphics settings in Wolfenstein: The New Order only affected a 10-15% difference in performance. Resolution cause a slightly bigger dip in performance though, dropping ~30% when switching from 720p to 1080p.

On 1280x720 and 1600x900 Wolfenstein: The New Order was perfectly stable and usually had a rock solid frame rate, except for High on 900p which had occasional yet noticeable drops and stutters. Switching up to 1080p was a similar story, with general performance perfectly playable but during intense firefights with upwards of 5 enemies it began to stutter and affect gameplay. 

We did try Ultra on 720p but this caused the frame-rate to drop down to an unplayable 2FPS, while trying to play on 900p caused a straight-up game crash with the error message below.

Wolfenstein: The New Order Crash Error Screen

Wolfenstein: The New Order CPU And Memory Bottlenecks 

It was from the benchmark results above that we thought it best to examine if there were any bottlenecks from the system's relatively modest 4GB RAM and the AMD FX-4100 CPU.

Wolfenstein: The New Order CPU And Memory Usage Graphs 

Wolfenstein: The New Order was clearly pushing the CPU and RAM usage to the limit, with both frequently hitting 96% usage plus. The lack of RAM could be responsible for the stuttering gameplay, while the processor usage often spiked once enemies were on-screen. Considering this rig is well below Bethesda's initial suggested minimum though, it performed pretty well and was a very playable experience.

There was a number of quirks with the game though that occasionally stood. Once while changing the settings down to 720//Low the frame rate lowered down to 1-2 FPS while in a corridor. Pumping the resolution back up and then resetting it solved this problem but it can also happen on checkpoint reloads and after cut-scenes. It will hopefully be patched out soon but for now it can be a nuisance. 

Changing settings also sometimes cause an intense flickering effect to cover the screen in Wolfenstein: The New Order, which didn't go until the settings were changed. I'm still not sure what caused this to happen three times but it makes for some pretty uncomfortable viewing until you can get it sorted.

Wolfenstein: The New Order Benchmarks AMD Radeon HD 6670

Keep an eye out soon for our Wolfenstein: The New Order review, as well as benchmarking on the GD Machine 2014 with its GeForce GTX 750 Ti and i5-4670K CPU.