Styx: Shards of Darkness PC Performance Review

[WYP]

Styx the Goblin is back with a whole new stealth-based adventure, but how well does this new infiltration game run on PC?



Read more on Styx: Shards of Darkness' PC performance.

 

[Lynx]

Detailed review, much appreciated for a fan of the game.
Any reason why we no longer bench with a 970? It's still the most popular GPU on the Steam Hardware Review.
Would be interesting to see how it degrades over time (nVidia special) compared to 10 series GPUs.

 

[WYP]

Detailed review, much appreciated for a fan of the game.
Any reason why we no longer bench with a 970? It's still the most popular GPU on the Steam Hardware Review.
Would be interesting to see how it degrades over time (nVidia special) compared to 10 series GPUs.

We have never had a 970 in the game stuff as most of the GPUs I test were not provided by 3rd parties (With the GTX 1060 and RX 480 GPUs we use being the exception).

As much as I would love to test a GTX 970, the problem is where does the testing stop? Every new GPU will add more work to do and if I add a GTX 970 I would also need an R9 390 for balance.

This is the big problem when it comes to covering this stuff, as my time is limited and my job is to cover both new games and news content on the website.

When it comes to covering how Nvidia/AMD GPUs age in new games, that is why we still use the R9 Fury X/GTX 980Ti and GTX 960/R9 380 GPUs in out tests, as these GPUs provide some great insight into how older GPUs run on modern games, especially modern DX12 titles.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

Man, I'm sick of games that run so poorly on AMD. In this case it's to a ridiculous degree. People moan about games not looking as good as they should be considering they need powerful GPU's. What I care about is parity and reasonable performance from both vendors. This kind of favouritism is incredibly destructive while demanding games in general help further the PC industry.

 

[Colts]

Man, I'm sick of games that run so poorly on AMD. In this case it's to a ridiculous degree. People moan about games not looking as good as they should be considering they need powerful GPU's. What I care about is parity and reasonable performance from both vendors. This kind of favouritism is incredibly destructive while demanding games in general help further the PC industry.

It's not favouritism nor is it the developers fault AMD is behind in the GPU market these past few years. This is soley on AMD. When an RX580 with 6.2 tflops competes with GTX 1060 with 3.8 tflops you got an issue fact is Nvidia is more efficient at getting the best performance from each tflop. This is all on AMD and has nothing to do with Developers of gaming or nvidia. If AMD Vega were to take the crown for best GPU it would need to be about 18 TFLOPS to compete with Nvidia 12 TFLOPS this also tells you AMD Vega 12.5 the highend card is only going to compete with GTX 1080 and nothing above it. AMD fanboys need to face this reality AMD just isn't as good as Nvidia at making GPU's but we need both GPU Vendors that is a fact. Just quit being so blind.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

It's not favouritism nor is it the developers fault AMD is behind in the GPU market these past few years. This is soley on AMD. When an RX580 with 6.2 tflops competes with GTX 1060 with 3.8 tflops you got an issue fact is Nvidia is more efficient at getting the best performance from each tflop. This is all on AMD and has nothing to do with Developers of gaming or nvidia. If AMD Vega were to take the crown for best GPU it would need to be about 18 TFLOPS to compete with Nvidia 12 TFLOPS this also tells you AMD Vega 12.5 the highend card is only going to compete with GTX 1080 and nothing above it. AMD fanboys need to face this reality AMD just isn't as good as Nvidia at making GPU's but we need both GPU Vendors that is a fact. Just quit being so blind.

I'm no engineer or developer, but you just confirmed what I was saying. When a 3.2 TFLOP GPU can beat a 6.2 TFLOP GPU, would you not say that is in part due to the way games are developed? In the same way a 7600K at 100% load can beat a 6c/12t CPU at 40% load, the infrastructure is not currently suited to such hardware. How is that AMD's fault? I've been disappointed by AMD's choices, but I don't blame them entirely. So I heavily disagree with you: this is not solely on AMD.

 

[NeverBackDown]

It's not favouritism nor is it the developers fault AMD is behind in the GPU market these past few years. This is soley on AMD. When an RX580 with 6.2 tflops competes with GTX 1060 with 3.8 tflops you got an issue fact is Nvidia is more efficient at getting the best performance from each tflop. This is all on AMD and has nothing to do with Developers of gaming or nvidia. If AMD Vega were to take the crown for best GPU it would need to be about 18 TFLOPS to compete with Nvidia 12 TFLOPS this also tells you AMD Vega 12.5 the highend card is only going to compete with GTX 1080 and nothing above it. AMD fanboys need to face this reality AMD just isn't as good as Nvidia at making GPU's but we need both GPU Vendors that is a fact. Just quit being so blind.

The fact that you think TFLOP is the end all be all performance measure along with the fact you have to be insulting by calling people blind, tells me(and others) all we need to know about you. Stick to something you are good at, this isn't it(this being how development works)

 

[WYP]

TBH TFLOPs is a useless metric for gaming performance, much like how clock speeds are useless for determining CPU performance.

TFLOPs should only ever be used to compare hardware from the same generation, as performance per clock can change wildly.

One other thing to note that on the Nvidia side they use base/boost clock to get their TFLOP numbers. When was the last time you have seen a Nvidia GPU clock anywhere near their base speeds? GPU Boost 3 ensures that clocks, in reality, are much higher, so the real TFLOP numbers should also be higher.