World in Conflict (PC) performance review

So what we'll do today is this, due to time restriction I had to limit image quality setting towards two options (medium image quality and high image quality). We'll be testing with the in-game benchmark (which is a very objective and beautiful representation of the actual gameplay) at 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 2560x1600 with as many graphics cards as I could find the time for, including DX9 and DX10 class graphics cards.

Test system

• NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI mainboard
• Core 2 Duo x6800 processor
• Corsair Dominator 1142 MHz DDR2 memory
• Windows Vista 32-bit
• NVIDIA ForceWare 163.71
• ATI Catalyst 7.9

Let's quickly look through some of the image quality settings. Starting at the lowest possible image quality setting to the "very high" IQ setting.

Let me for the record state though that we make use of the actual full game, not the demo. A lot has been optimized and improved since the beta was released.

World in Conflict - Low Image Quality setting (IQ from now on). We spot rather lousy texture quality, lack of lengthy shaders (look at the water for example), lack of shadows. Still not too bad. But wait ...

Now we look at medium IQ, much more detail can be found here, this is the in-game "Medium Quality" setting. This is the level at what 90% of you will be playing. Nice volumetric clouds, shadows. Feature and texture rich environment. This is a pretty good scenery to play in.

Here we see what the 10% of us will be seeing with a high end-system. The level of detail is cranked up a notch, DX10 is at work. We see volumetric rays casting from the sun, soft shadows from these clouds (can be spotted to the left) and once zoomed in you'll notice way nicer water being rendered.

Let's move on into the city and zoom in a little on the vehicles and look at the environment from a low perspective where buildings, road and tree detail is becoming more apparent.

Next page please.