VGA performance: Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery (DX10)

Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery

I have been playing this excellent RTS, ever since the first Anno series was launched many years ago. Heck, I had a ton of fun with the original game series like Anno 1602 and 1701. If you're unfamiliar with the Anno series of games, they have all been (1404 is the 3rd sequel) colony-builders that take place in vast archipelagos filled with pirates, natives, treasures, and rival colonies. Typically, players start with a single ship packed with essential goods with which they colonize a single island, and then need to expand their realm.

With the same principles and philosophy yet more trading dynamics in-game, this series changed a little. Next to that the graphics engine had an overhaul allowing a DX10 code path, brushing up and speeding up things here and there while pertaining really nice image quality.

For our test with Anno 1404 we enable everything we can to the highest possible setting, we render the game in DirectX 10 mode with 4x Anti-Aliasing enabled. As a result the game is playable up-to 2560x1600 (!)

Anno 1404 is one of those titles that has always favored the Radeon HD 5xxx. As such this is one of the very few titles where the GTX 470 is a tidbit slower compared to the R5850. It's nothing worrisome though.

For the GTX 480 we see similar behavior. Also, the latest Catalyst 10.3 drivers have shown performance improvements for the ATI cards. Would we have used say Cat 10.1, the lead would probably have gone to NVIDIA. Well good one on ATI's behalf, well deserved.

Again, a comparison model based on a GPU bound resolution. Full comparison of the tested game at 19x12. You can look at these charts as a graphics performance chart.