17 - Game Performance: World in Conflict | 3DMark Vantage

Gaming: World in Conflict

Impressive gameplay and graphics that will make you go into shock and awe. Yes, World in Conflict has been released. This game offers a serious graphical challenge to you guys, the gamers. Wars often end in either victory, loss or compromise.

Vivendi Universal recently was kind enough to send us a copy a couple of days prior to the release of the game. You are an avid Guru3D reader so that means you also know we'll do things a bit differently. It's not moving very fast, but slowly we see more and more DirectX 10 titles becoming available on the market.

World in Conflict is a late Cold War real-time strategy game with a strong focus on unit tactics, action, team play, and destruction. Players take on a specific role commanding air, armor, infantry, and support units to form a combined arms force against the enemy. By controlling key strategic points on the map, you sway the battle in your favor. There is no resource-gathering, so every second not spent fighting the enemy over a piece of land is a second wasted.

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

What you are observing above are the results done with the medium settings. Traditionally we see good performance for any mid-range card up-to a resolution of 1920x1200 yet then only the high-end cards can do the job. The GeForce GTX 280 however laugh at it ... it ranks on top at 2560x1600 with an average of 61 frames per second.

That's pure muscle man.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

The graphics tests will have four quality presets available: Entry, Performance, High and Extreme. Each preset specifies a certain setting for the rendering options listed in section 5.6. The graphics load increases significantly from the lowest to the highest preset. The Performance preset is targeted for mid-range hardware with 256 MB of graphics memory. The Entry preset is targeted for integrated and low-end hardware with 128 MB of graphics memory. The higher presets require 512MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.

3DMark Vantage is obviously fresh from the shelves. We show two modes versus two scores.

• Performance mode with overall score and GPU score
• Extreme performance mode with overall score and GPU score

What I need you to do is focus on the GPU scores, as that's what we are measuring. Here you can see pretty well (though synthetic measures) what the GTX 280 is capable of.

Let's crank it up a notch.

The blue colored results are the standard performance tests done on Vantage. See that orange line .. that's actually the same performance test for the GTX 280 yet I decided to go rough with it, I set the resolution there at over 4 million pixels at 2560x1600, even then it's still faster than a 9800 GTX.

That is pure strength my friends.