Sniper Elite 5 im Technik-Test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

In Sniper Elite 5, Rebellion once again sends players on the hunt with the sniper rifle. In addition to the usual graphics card benchmarks with the PC version, ComputerBase also took a closer look at the differences between DirectX 12 and Vulkan. Textures and framepacing are highlights, but flicker.

Sniper Elite 5 brings more of the same

After a little more than five years, Rebellion is launching the fifth part of the well-known Sniper Elite game series. And with Sniper Elite 5, the buyer actually gets exactly what the previous parts did, only a little more modern and just more of it. If you liked the predecessors, you will also be happy with the latest iteration.

Rebellion again uses the in-house Asura engine, but has updated it compared to its direct predecessor. Visually, the AA game leaves a decent impression with one exception, but of course it can’t keep up with a large-scale production (more on that later). Surface details and textures as well as framepacing are the highlights of the graphics, but in terms of animation, lighting and character representation, Sniper Elite 5 cannot keep up with other games. And it flickers heavily.

The graphics flicker all at once

Sniper Elite 5 relies on a post-processing version without a temporal component for anti-aliasing. As a result, the graphics are quite sharp and without graphic errors even in low resolutions, but the antialiasing does not correctly capture many objects. The result: it flickers when you move.

Even in high resolutions such as Ultra HD, Sniper Elite 5 still flickers clearly, but in lower resolutions it is extreme. Here the developers should definitely have opted for temporal anti-aliasing, because the solution used in the game is completely overwhelmed.

FSR 1.0 only makes things worse

Sniper Elite 5 supports AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0, which as a purely spatial upscaling makes the effect even worse. Because unlike FSR 2.0, FSR 1.0 cannot do anything about flickering. Accordingly, Rebellion should have done without FSR 1.0 completely, the technology cannot be used sensibly. Also, since Sniper Elite 5 lacks temporal anti-aliasing, it’s unlikely that modern upsampling in the form of FSR 2.0 or Nvidia DLSS will be patched in. Because this would mean more work than with other games, which is probably not possible for the relatively small development team.

In addition to the low-level API DirectX 12, Sniper Elite 5 also supports Vulkan; DirectX 12 is active by default. In addition, Async Compute can be switched on or off for both interfaces. By default, the feature is active.

Standard fare in the graphics menu

Sniper Elite 5 offers a rudimentary graphics menu on PC. There are several individual graphic options and four different graphic presets: “Low”, “Medium”, “High” and “Ultra”, whereby “Ultra” also represents the maximum level of detail. In addition, the game’s own downsampling and upsampling are available, which means that the render resolution can be freely adjusted in 5 percent increments between 50 and 200 percent.

It is not possible to switch between the APIs DirectX 12 and Vulkan in the game itself, this is only possible in its own launcher and thus before starting Sniper Elite 5.

Four graphic presets with visible differences

The four graphic presets “Ultra”, “High”, “Medium” and “Low” all show optical differences. For example, more objects cast shadows on “Ultra” than on “High”, and some of the shadows have a higher resolution. Furthermore, the visibility with “Ultra” is higher. Objects at a distance show more details or are sometimes only shown in the first place. In general, the differences aren’t too great, and you can switch back to “High” without hesitation in the event of performance problems.

The “Medium” setting works much more aggressively. The textures clearly lose their sharpness, and the surface details are visibly reduced. The shadows are further reduced and the view range is noticeably reduced even at medium distances. The low preset uses the same adjustment screws even more intensively. “Low” and “Medium” must therefore be discouraged for optical reasons.

Every graphic preset brings a big FPS boost in Sniper Elite 5. Those who do without the highest setting “Ultra” and instead reduce the graphics to “High” accelerate the Radeon RX 6800 XT by 46 percent and the GeForce RTX 3080 by 48 percent. Accordingly, the tuning potential is already high with this setting, but even more would be possible in the event of performance problems.

Because the medium presets increase the FPS on the AMD GPU by another 29 percent, with the Nvidia counterpart it is 25 percent. And with the low preset there is another, final boost of 38 or 31 percent.