Image quality settings

Visually, the game's impressive, especially when looking at water and object detail, it really shows off the city building details. We'll be testing the Anno 1404 with the following graphics cards today:

• GeForce 9600 GT 256MB
• GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
• GeForce 9800 GX2 1024MB
• GeForce GTS 250 512MB
• GeForce GTX 260 SP216 896MB
• GeForce GTX 275 896MB
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB
• GeForce GTX 295 1792MB
• Radeon HD 4770 512MB
• Radeon HD 4830 512MB
• Radeon HD 4850 512MB
• Radeon HD 4870 1024MB
• Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB
• Radeon HD 4890 1024MB

So in this game we'll fire off a decent set of quality settings (shown later on) at several graphics cards.

So for image quality settings we opt the best. First off, Anno 1404 has a DirectX 10 code path. I'm not saying there will be much visual difference in-between DX9 and DX10. But DX10 does allow a few extras. Since we are all graphics whores here at Guru3D.com, we select DirectX 10 with 4 levels of anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. 

DX10 is perfectly playable. You won't need a thousand dollar setup to render the game.

Our test procedure is based on three similar runs with FRAPS measuring the framerate. We average out the three results and that is your score.  The outcome is very reliable and will differ very little with each run.

Since we'll be using this titles as future benchmark in our graphics cards review we wanted a little AA as well. We enabled 4xAA, the high end cards can keep up really well, whereas the mid-range segment will have a more rough time. Here's an overview of our test settings.

If you are going  for maximum performance deselect VSYNC (vertical synchronization). Mind you, screen tearing will become visible. It's best to leave it enable if you are not testing or measuring graphics performance. We'll disable it, as we do not want the graphics cards limited to 60 FPS.

DirectX 10 is enabled by enabling transparency, all settings other to high.