Anno 1800: PC graphics performance benchmark review

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Concluding

Concluding

Today we bring you an early preview of what's to come and can be expected. As mentioned the Radeons need a driver or game-patch update as overall the perf was lacking for some reason (at least on my end). We have no doubt that'll be fixed in a few dfays at launch and will update our results once that happens. Also, this is the Open Beta that runs right now as we speak. I wanted to test it as the game engine obviously is finished, but more importantly, you can try out Anno 1800 right now, it's free to download, install and play this weekend in the open beta. Just load up Uplay or the Epic store to make that happen. I love this series, the problem is that I start up a game and 5 hours later I wonder what happened with the time :)

As mentioned the game has had a nice graphics update, the gameplay is exactly what it was with previous iterations of the game. That said, performance is relative. After a few hours, we had enough citizens in the little village to perform some benchmarking, however, the bigger that city will get, the slower the perf will become. This is the nature of the game and its incredible complexity. The quality in-game seem is really okay and are more polished on the PC compared to the previous edition. It is obvious that any graphics card will run if you give it the right image quality settings. The trick with PC gaming, however, is that image quality is something you want and prefer, as otherwise, you'd be playing on a console. It's a good looking game at high-quality settings, and at "ultra high" quality setting perf is just rubbish. So with a reasonably modern graphics card, very "high quality" settings at up-to 2560x1440 really should not be an issue and the Full HD domain is easy enough for any modern card to ooze out decent framerates. Memory wise anything starting at 4GB is the minimum all saying domain. Aside from a random occasional stutter and some FPS drops when zooming or flying over the islands the title will be very playable and enjoyable to watch. Ultra HD does look very nice


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DX11 versus DX12 was a little weird, in the early closed beta DX12 was much better. Right now it's a slight win for DX11 (at least on my end). We do use a very fast processor though so that might have had the upper hand there. It's easy enough to try out what works best for you yourself though. BTW the game still has some bugs, resolutions switching in-game with DX12 results into crashes, with DX11 weirdly enough, not an issue. Things really start to look better at the high-quality mode, and sure either 2560x1440 resolution wise or something above that up-to Ultra HD, serves this game the best. Up-to 2560x1440 the game remains very playable. At 1920x1080 the vast majority of the game plays with proper framerates though combined with any modern age graphics card. Overall the game feels good in game-play, there is little negative to mention aside from the fact you'll need to like the genre.

For us, it is clear that the game will be graphically a feast for the eyes with gameplay that will last you days. FPS weirdly as it sounds, for this kind of game does not even need to be high. So at 40 FPS you're good to go really. Remember, the Anno series always struggles with low performance in massively developed islands, we hope that with this iteration that will have changed. 

If you like the genre, go download it and try it.

Update April 16th, the new 19.4.2 did not add additional performance for the Radeon cards, it simply looks like NVIDIA was able to push out a really good optimization. For now the resutls stand as they are. 

- H.

  • GeForce graphics cards use the latest 425.31 WHQL driver (download).
  • Radeon graphics cards we used the latest AMD Radeon Adrenalin 19.4.2 driver (download). 

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