XCOM 2 – GPU / CPU / Memory / OC Performance scaling

On the following pages we’re going to have a close look at how XCOM 2 performs in combination with an overclocked Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU as well as overclocked memory. We’re also going to show you the effect when both memory and CPU have been overclocked and that we do in combination with nine different, recent graphics cards and at three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p as well as 2160p at ultra settings.

XCOM 2 from Ubisoft is based on the Unreal Engine. To be a bit more precise the developers from Firaxis Games are using version 3.5 of the Unreal Engine. With version 3 the following new features were introduced:

  • DX11 MSAA hair
  • Subsurface scattering
  • Enhanced bloom
  • Apex clothing
  • High quality shadows
  • Bokeh depth of field
  • Shadowed point light reflections
  • Tessellation and displacement
  • Deferred rendering with MSAA support
  • Image based reflections
  • Color grading
  • Cascaded shadow mapping
  • Light shafts
  • Seamless lighting transitions
  • Realistic foliage
  • Soft-edge motion blur

If you start XCOM for the first time, already the intro screen is surprisingly beautiful to look at, being a rendered in-game scene. The Unreal 3.5 engine does benefit from powerful graphics subsystem and you can basically throw almost as much pixel-acceleration-power at it and you will see an improvement in frame rates. To check whether this is really the case, we’re not just going to test this game with nine different recent graphics card, we’re also going to overclock the CPU in our test system to 4.8 GHz and the memory to 3.0 GHz. Furthermore we’re doing all this running three different resolutions.