VGA performance: Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery (DX10)

Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery

So ever since the first Anno series was launched many years ago, I have been playing this excellent RTS ever since. 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 we can enable to the highest possible setting, we render the game in DirectX 10 mode with 4x Anti-Ailiasing enabled. As a result the game is playable up-to 2560x1600 (!) Anno 1404 was one of these titles that benefits massively from the Radeon HD 5870 and 5970.

That performance literally is flabbergasting to see. Due to the black texture bug we had to re-do all Radeon results with the game's new v1.1 patch (which indeed solved the bug).

So this is a comparison model based on a GPU bound resolution (1920x1200). You can look the chart above as a performance VGA chart. VGA performance ranking will become very clear this way. So at a monitor resolution of 19x12 we get 100 FPS on average returned.

Interestingly the 5970 is slightly slower than two 5850 cards setup in Crossfire, where we feel the product should perform in-between 5850 Crossfire and 5870 Crossfire. We'll see more of that behavior in this review. Still that is tremendous performance alright, very nice.