DX10: 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
• use DirectX 10 mode
• have 4x Anti-Aliasing enabled
• used campaign build mode and have built three islands with extensively sized cities

Well, performance is more than enough to play the game really well at any resolution. Anno 1404 always has been a bit of an issue title with NVIDIA, it still is. Then again, at 144 FPS you hardly have anything to complain about. It is one of the very few titles that doesn't scale well.