God of War Ragnarök Performance Benchmark

[W1zzard]

The long-awaited God of War Ragnarök is now available on PC, bringing the latest chapter of the epic action-adventure series to a whole new audience. The PC version offers enhanced visuals, featuring support for cutting-edge technologies like DLSS, FSR, and Frame Generation. In our performance review, we'll look at the game's graphics quality, VRAM consumption, and how it runs across a range of contemporary graphics cards.

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[Makaveli]

Glad they implemented FSR 3.1 on this game for those that need upscaling.

 

[Arkz]

It's on PS4 too, not a PS5 exclusive like the first line says.

 

[Macro Device]

Weird how RX 6800 non-XT underperformed so hard. It should be 30+ percent ahead of 6700 XT, not 25%. Did you get a dud?

 

[nguyen]

I have problem digesting this part

If you haven't played the game yet, definitely do check it out. Don't listen to all the forced PlayStation account drama—it's a fantastic game. On my main PC I got a black screen on startup and the game would never load, due to the PSN network registration stuff, the game worked fine on the GPU test system. Interestingly, the pirated version of game runs fine on my main PC, so the issue was not with the game itself, but with the added Sony spyware.

The game is not available in non PSN countries, and it failed to load even in PSN countries?

The game deserve a 65% steam rating IMO

 

[Claudio]

very nice game, nothing to say... too bad that inexplicably you can't select more than stereo output. I hope for a patch to select 5.1 / 7.1 etc

 

[Xeanoa]

@Wizzard Is it possible to include the game title in the "Relative GPU performance vs TPU 25-Game Average" graph?
Just tried sharing a few of them on Discord to talk about and it turned out pretty confusing not knowing which belonged to which game.

 

[64K]

Very good performance even on Ultra settings. I haven't heard a lot yet on the game but I suspect it is optimized well to achieve these results. Looks like a great job by Santa Monica and the game is definitely going on my buy list. First I want to play God of War. I'm woefully behind on newer games.

 

[JasBC]

Could you test the game using the mod that makes it so GPUs with under 6 gigabytes of VRAM can run it? I'm curious to the fact they softblocked it, people on the net have been testing the game on GPUs with less memory with the mod and it apparently runs but who knows.

 

[Silkysmooth]

Something wrong with RDNA2 performance in your review , the 4060 shouldn't be faster than the 6700XT neither should a 3060ti be faster than a 6800 maybe SAM wasn't on ?

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

@W1zzard curious of something, do you swap the GPUs on one motherboard or several?

Just thinking in how soon would that pci-e slot will die due to wear.

 

[Silkysmooth]

Weird how RX 6800 non-XT underperformed so hard. It should be 30+ percent ahead of 6700 XT, not 25%. Did you get a dud?

All rnda 2 cards are underperforming haven't you noticed the 3070ti even outperforms a 6900XT

 

[Arkz]

@W1zzard curious of something, do you swap the GPUs on one motherboard or several?

Just thinking in how soon would that pci-e slot will die due to wear.

Well, my N64 had carts put in and removed 1000s of times, so I'm guessing a while.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Awesome performance benchmark as always.


Glad you're calling out UE stutter issues in the conclusion of games that don't exhibit it.

 

[HaKN !]

Very wierd perfomance graph ! i get 170+ frames on everything ultra WITHOUT upscaling or FG. And 290-300 fps with FSR 3.1 and FG

 

[W1zzard]

It's on PS4 too, not a PS5 exclusive like the first line says.

Fixed, I had it right in the conclusion though

Very wierd perfomance graph ! i get 170+ frames on everything ultra WITHOUT upscaling or FG. And 290-300 fps with FSR 3.1 and FG

On one of the later maps, or first map? So FG works on AMD?

@W1zzard curious of something, do you swap the GPUs on one motherboard or several?

Just thinking in how soon would that pci-e slot will die due to wear.

I'm using the same single system for all these tests, otherwise there's too many variables that cause inconsistencies. I typically end up changing motherboard like one a year or so during normal upgrade cycles. Never had any issues with PCIe slot wear, and I'm doing probably 1000+ slot insertions on each of these boards. The insertion force does get noticeably lower, I mostly notice it right after switching, when the force needed is unexpectedly high.

Bigger issue for the motherboards is scratching near the IO slot area from repeated card insertions. After breaking like 3 boards over the years in the same spot, I put two layers of tape in that area (on boards without armor)

Something wrong with RDNA2 performance in your review , the 4060 shouldn't be faster than the 6700XT neither should a 3060ti be faster than a 6800 maybe SAM wasn't on ?

Shouldn't, but it is, and that's part of the reason for these articles to investigate differences between architectures. Either AMD is underperforming or NVIDIA is overperforming. Also look at Intel

https://imgur.com/uL6BoUN

 

[Macro Device]

3070ti even outperforms a 6900XT

If it wasn't for 8 GB VS 16 GB I'd say 3070 Ti is generally a much better purchase (at 8 GB, it's mediocre at best). However, not my point. All other RDNA2 GPUs underperform as much as 6700 XT does but 6800 non-XT gets even worse relative results.

 

[yfn_ratchet]

Always baffles me how often Nvidia comes out on top for titles that were developed and designed specifically for AMD-based solutions. This happened with Rift Apart, too.

Is it because the dev workstations were GeForce/Quadro and the performance optimizations done there don't translate all that well to Radeon? Is it an issue with how the games are ported to PC? Is it some random idiosyncratic thing that no one has bothered to sniff out and deal with?

 

[Trunks0]

On one of the later maps, or first map? So FG works on AMD?

According to reports... (and you can google around Forums, YouTube and etc) the DLSS FrameGen can be wonky and not always activate properly, so some times a restart of the game resolves it and it will work. Further more FSR 3.1-Frame Generation works perfectly fine, without any issues.

 

[W1zzard]

the DLSS FrameGen can be wonky and not always activate properly (some times a restart of the game resolves it and it will work).

Good idea, just tried it, still doesn't work.

 

[cerulliber]

4K60
RTX 4070 Super eur 600
RX 7900 XT eur 700
still don't get exactly how amd is competing nvidia on mainstream, I'd rather say they compete at bad pricing /s

model of decompressed textures to improve performance is great and should adopted by any serious game, cause I don't really care how big is a game if it works well

only con: some tweaks to disable forced TAA, eta 5min for non-taa people.

 

[Trunks0]

Good idea, just tried it, still doesn't work.

Yeah. It's clearly a little under baked. Because people are having different experiences... but the unifying element seems to be that it's clearly got problems right now.

 

[harm9963]

Using ultra with DLAA at 4K , might need a patch for HDR , or windows update , cause it cuts out or in , faded look to beautiful , have to play with settings , similar thing happen with Robocop .

 

[Vya Domus]

Always baffles me how often Nvidia comes out on top for titles that were developed and designed specifically for AMD-based solutions. This happened with Rift Apart, too.

Is it because the dev workstations were GeForce/Quadro and the performance optimizations done there don't translate all that well to Radeon

I've explained it in another thread, basically all shaders are pre compiled on consoles because the hardware doesn't change but on PC they are always compiled at run time, this means whatever optimizations done by the developer for the console version are either never carried over to the PC version or they simply don't work as intended because the compiler emits different code for different GPUs. In theory the developer has to optimize the game a second time for every other GPU vendor, in practice they almost certainly never do that.

They probably optimize it some for Nvidia, make sure it runs on AMD and probably don't even test it on Intel, they leave the rest to the drivers. That's why games run so atrociously bad on Intel or don't run at all btw.

 

[Makaveli]

All rnda 2 cards are underperforming haven't you noticed the 3070ti even outperforms a 6900XT

I'm wondering if its related to the driver since this is beta and AMD has yet to release official 28.9.1 drivers which I think should drop next week.