Conclusion

Sniper Elite 4 is an entertaining shooter with signature gunplay that's focused on long-distance combat. You will find a good balance of difficulty settings that cateres to sniping pros as well as fast-paced action lovers. Did we mention the new, more gory killcams? Gameplay definitely stays entertaining thanks to various gadgets and mixed vegetation zones with day/night cycles. Graphics are excellent, but not the best we'll see in 2017.

Rebellion's engine refresh introduces support for DirectX 12 with Async Compute. Our testing shows that both AMD and NVIDIA gain performance from use of the new API, but the amount of FPS gained differs vastly between GPU architectures. While users of NVIDIA Maxwell and Pascal cards will see up to 5% performance gained, AMD owners should definitely use the DX12 path, as it brings with it performance improvements between 17% and 27%. Now, you might think that this means NVIDIA performance is a disaster, but that's not exactly correct. Rather, it seems NVIDIA's cards work equally well in both DX11 and DX12 at their expected performance level relative to the competition from AMD, and AMD cards need to run in DX12 to reach those levels.

The only exception is the R9 Fury X which does extremely well, beating the GTX 1070 at 4K, sitting right between the GTX 1070 and 1080. What makes this victory even more memorable is that the Fury X "only" has 4 GB of VRAM. At least 4 GB of VRAM seems to be the ideal memory configuration for Sniper Elite 4 to be run at highest details. Our memory usage testing reveals that the game doesn't use excess memory and today's gaming cards won't run into trouble, memory capacity-wise.

To enjoy the game at 2560x1440 with the highest details, you need to invest in a GeForce GTX 1070, which can be had for around $370 right now. 4K Ultra HD is a daunting task for all single-GPU graphics cards we have. Even the GeForce GTX 1080 can not reach 60 FPS. Fluid 1080p Full HD is well in reach of the GTX 1060 and RX 480.