Budget graphics card performance - CPU core scaling

Entry level graphics card performance vs quality settings

What if you have a budget graphics card? Well, you will have five presets (Low to Ultra High). Aside from anti-aliasing, all of these image quality levels feel well-balanced. Anti-aliasing is a bit of a conundrum though and already activated on the Medium preset and quickly raised to 8xAA at HIGH quality preset. What kind of effect will choosing lowering your quality rendering mode ? We use near Ultra High quality settings on everything (hey this is PC gaming right?) versus an acceptable level of performance.  A land based RTS however already feels good at 30 FPS (true that). 

But what if you have say a GeForce GTX 950. Take a good look at our settings (Ultra High and 4xAA) and let's focus on 1080P as I assume that's the monitor resolution you would use. Yes playable eh ? Now I included WQHD none the less as well. For mainstream and upwards we recommend the High Ultra quality level, yet lower AA towards 4X. However drooping to say HIGH quality mode all of the sudden allows for game-play at WQHD. Going lower than HIGH however will have a serious impact on rendering quality. My advise with an entry level to mainstream graphics cards stands at HIGH or Ultra HIGH, yet with lowered or disabled AA.

CPU scaling

We received the question if performance would differ based on the number of CPU cores. Our X99 based motherboard can independently control the number of CPU cores of our Core i7 5960X in the sense they can be disabled / enabled. 

In the first example above we take the most stringent graphics setting we can select, this is Ultra High Quality with 8xMSAA on a GeForce GTX 980. Obviously this results into a massive GPU bottleneck, the difference therefore even with 2 CPU cores (hyper-threading is enabled) is NIL.

Once we lower image quality settings towards HIGH with 4xAA enabled we slowly see a bit of an effect in the average framerate, yet we are talking 2 to 3 FPS differences here in-between two and eight cores enabled. That's impressive, it means the game engine is very CPU efficiency used in terms of proper utilization. We ran the test multiple times and check manually if the cores had been properly disabled. Our processor is overclocked to a fixed 4.4 GHz per and for each CPU core. Short conclusion, running the game with a modern quad-core excellent or even dual-core Core i3 processors is fine. We do not know just yet how 2 core CPUs would manage with huge worlds completelybuilt out with cities and complexity. But we assume everybody has a quad-core processor anno 2015, not anno 2205.

Now we could lower the image quality settings even further to medium or low quality, but since even a mainstream graphics card already can manage 1080P with high quality settings, there's just no point in doing so. At low quality we'd reach the triple digits in FPS, there you'd probably see bigger differences. But again, that's not representative of gaming.