Most Intense Graphical Demanding Video Games Of All Time

May 4, 2017 by Zaid Saifi

Today, few things can push your PC to its breaking point—and sometimes beyond!—like games.

Crysis (2007)

Engine: CryEngine (1)
2560×1440 very high 4xAA: 72/33 fps avg/min

It’s not the first game to punish high-end systems with extreme system requirements, but it’s the game that kicked off a meme that continues today. That 20 billion dollar supercomputer is fast … but can it run Crysis? LPC is fast, but can it run Crysis? And so it goes. I just pulled this game out of retirement to see how it runs on a modern system, expecting to see some good performance, but either the drivers, or Windows 10, or the game itself just don’t seem to care that nine years have passed. Crysis continues to be a hardware glutton, and even now it tends to run poorly at its very high preset, averaging above 60 fps on the test system but also routinely dropping well below that mark.

Back in 2007, running Crysis at maximum quality wasn’t just demanding, it was impossible—there wasn’t a system around that could come close to 60+ fps without dropping many of the settings. What was the problem? Crysis pioneered the use of several advanced rendering techniques, and it was one of the first DirectX 10 games to hit the market. The combination of new algorithms and a new API meant that it pushed the technology boundaries in ways that the hardware wasn’t really equipped to handle. And yes, the implementation probably wasn’t optimal. Crysis Warhead and Crysis 2 stepped back the hardware requirements (relative to what was available) without a major drop in quality, and while Crysis 3 (2013) continues to tax modern systems (64/47 fps on my test system), none of those sequels have pushed hardware at the time of release quite as hard as the original Crysis.

Grand Theft Auto V (2015)

Engine: Rage
2560×1440 max + advanced: 64/43 fps

Grand Theft Auto wasn’t always known as a series that could bring your system to its knees, and to its credit, GTA5 can scale way back on image quality and get much higher frame rates. But if you want to max out the settings, Rockstar has a lot of extra features that put the hurt on your GPU.

Along the way to maxing out every graphics option, I enabled Nvidia PCSS (that’s ‘percentage closer soft shadows’ if you’re wondering), 4xMSAA, and all the extras in the advanced graphics settings. That dropped performance down to just over 60 fps with periodic dips below that, and it required more than 4GB VRAM, which is pretty impressive for a game that can run at close to 200 fps at ‘normal’ settings on the same hardware. Multi-GPU scaling is good, however, so high-end SLI systems can generally handle 4K at max (or close to it) settings.

Battlefield 1 (2016)

Engine: Frostbite 3
2560×1440 ultra: 115/89 fps

Battlefield 1 looks quite nice and can run well on a large variety of graphics cards, but while the single-player campaign isn’t too demanding, multiplayer can really tax your CPU. In most games, a Core i5 processor will be the least of your worries, but in BF1 with 64 players running around, we saw framerates drop nearly 30 percent going from an overclocked 6-core 4.2GHz i7-5930K to a 4-core 3.9GHz i5-4690. That puts performance just over 80 fps average still, but expect plenty of dips below 60 fps during intense battles.

Games that make me say you should seriously consider opting for a Core i7 over a Core i5 are rare, but Battlefield 1 definitely belongs on the list. Note also that Battlefield 4 and Star Wars: Battlefront use the same engine, though they don’t seem to be quite as demanding as the newcomer.

The Division (2016)

Engine: Snowdrop
2560×1440 max HBAO+ HFTS SMAA: 54/36 fps

The Division includes dynamic lighting, reflections, parallax mapping, and contact shadows, along with some Nvidia GameWorks technologies like HBAO+ and HFTS (Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows, an enhancement of PCSS).

I normally test using the ‘ultra’ preset, but there are quite a few features that can be set to even higher levels. For this test, I maxed out everything, including object rendering distance, SMAA, and of course HFTS shadows and HBAO+ ambient occlusion. The GTX 1080 scores 69/46 at the ultra preset, but adding in these other features drops performance by over 20 percent. At maximum quality settings, that makes The Division one of the most demanding games currently available, though you’ll need an Nvidia GPU if you want to enable certain features like HFTS.

The Witcher 3 (2015)

Engine: REDengine 3
2560×1440 ultra w/ HBAO+: 53/40 fps

Some people complained that the graphics quality of The Witcher 3 was reduced between the preview ‘bullshots’ and what we eventually received, but that was probably done in the name of balancing performance against image fidelity. Because the game is still super demanding, especially if you enable HairWorks and all the other extras—which I did for this test. That drops performance by 25 percent compared to my normal testing (without HairWorks or HBAO+), and the GTX 1080 ends up dropping well below 60 fps.

One interesting fact to point out is that if you have an SLI setup, the in-game anti-aliasing (FXAA) causes serious issues with multi-GPU scaling, so you’re better off disabling that feature in the game and using Nvidia’s drivers to force FXAA on. Once you do that, a second GPU can improve performance by around 75 percent. Which means 1080 SLI is just about enough to run 4K at max settings and still get 60 fps.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)

Engine: Dawn
2560×1440 ultra (no AA): 50/40 fps *

The undisputed king of demanding games right now, selecting the ‘ultra’ preset in DXMD will consume your graphics card and leave it spitting out broken and flickering pixels. Okay, not really. But the game can take even the fastest GPU and still fail to come anywhere near 60 fps at 1440p ultra—and that’s without enabling 4xMSAA. * Enabling 4xMSAA drops performance in half, which means a single GTX 1080 pokes along at just 25/20 fps at 1440p. You can forget about 4K ultra for now, as that would halve framerates yet again. A pair of Titan X cards in SLI might get above 30 fps at 4K ultra with 4xMSAA, though. And unlike Ark, the game actually looks really great—you can at least appreciate the level of detail and complexity being rendered on your system and think, “okay, I see why my system is struggling.”

The secret to DXMD’s GPU-killing performance comes via every modern graphical bell and whistle you care to name. Dynamic lighting, screenspace reflections, tessellation, volumetric lighting, subsurface scattering, cloth physics, parallax occlusion mapping, and hyperbolic refractions. (I made that last one up.) The good news is you can disable a lot of these features to improve performance, and not all of them make a huge difference in the way the game looks. Still, even using the low (minimum quality) preset on a GTX 1080, DXMD only manages to average 128/97 fps at 1080p. The GTX 1080 is about three times as fast as the GTX 1050, which means budget cards like the 1050 at minimum quality will only run at ~40 fps. This is the Crysis of 2016, using technology and hardware in ways that will tax even the fastest current system. Perhaps five years from now, we’ll have hardware that will finally be up to the task.

Source – PCGamer ( Jarred Walton )