GeForce GTX 460 SLI review - 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 in the 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 
• enable the highest possible image quality settings.
• DirectX 10 mode
• 4x Anti-Aliasing enabled.
• Use campaign build mode and have built three islands with extensive sizes cities.

It nearly is getting a little boring, but SLI scaling here is grand as well. Roughly 1.9x in the resolutions after 1600x1200. Even 2560x1600 is now butter smooth nearing 2x perormance.

Here's a good example of competitive SLI scaling again, with a single GTX 460 / R5830 the two cards are roughly equally fast. But once we activate multi-GPU gaming, then SLI scales better.

A competitive comparison of the tested game at 19x12. ATI, from day one, has been so strong with this game title. Performance is more than sufficient enough to play the game really well at any resolution in SLI.