Date:
Monday , October 08, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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World in Conflict: DX10 Performance and IQ

World in Conflict will test your mettle as a military commander, and your computer as a DirectX 10 gaming machine. Does the DirectX 10 rendering mode offer any visual or performance improvements over the DirectX 9 rendering mode?

Introduction

HardOCP is dedicated to proving the value of computer hardware to our enthusiastic readers, especially when it comes to affecting the gameplay experience provided by various video cards. In previous game-focused articles, we have explored what value DirectX 10, a Windows Vista exclusive, would bring to the table. The answers, of course, varied as wildly as the games themselves, ranging from an open-ended wild-west shooter, to a frozen world in deep space, and all the way back to Earth in a sunken, cracked post-World War II dystopia.

A few consistencies have shown themselves, such as enhanced shadows in DirectX 10, but the differences have mostly failed to impress us. Of the games we have seen, Call of Juarez made the most impressive use of the new DirectX technology, and Lost Planet offered very little improvement by comparison. BioShock was somewhere in the middle, using DirectX 10 to produce some noticeable rendering differences, but at the somewhat significant cost of disabled AA support in DirectX 10. Now we are turning our sights to a new entry in the DirectX 10 gaming catalog: World in Conflict. Please Digg To Share!

World in Conflict

We have now evaluated the DirectX 10 experience on three full retail games. We are getting closer to seeing what DirectX 10 will truly do for us. However, since we have only evaluated only First Person Shooters of various types, we may have been missing something. World in Conflict is a different type of game: a Real-Time Strategy game. For those that may be unfamiliar with the RTS genre, it is simply a third-person war simulation in which the player acts as the mastermind commander, moving various military units around the virtual battlefield, telling them where to go and whom or what to attack or defend. Some RTS's, known as "dirt-farmers" require a measure of resource harvesting and building, whereas others are solely combat games, focusing on battle tactics. Some people refer to the latter as "Real-Time Tactical" games. World in Conflict fits neatly into this category.

Due to the nature of the strategy-game genre, and the simple mechanic of the third-person camera, our minimum standards for performance are slackened a little. We can generally tolerate a lower framerate in strategy games than we can in shooters. However, that has nothing to do with the demands placed upon the hardware by the game, as we have seen strategy games which require more computing power than many shooters.

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On September 18th, 2007, the legendary American game publisher Sierra released the latest effort from Swedish developer Massive Entertainment. Entitled World in Conflict, the real-time strategy game simulates armed conflict between the armies of the United States and the communist regime of the USSR in the closing days of the 1980’s.

World in Conflict presents a chillingly authentic Cold War scenario where the Berlin wall never fell. Created by Cold War authority and best-selling author Larry Bond, the story begins in 1989 as the Soviets, fearing certain collapse, boldly advance into Europe. NATO responds in force only to be met on a second front -- a full-fledged invasion of the American homeland. Players take on the top role of field commander, leading the era's most powerful military machines in the campaign to retake America's cities and suburbs.

World in Conflict eschews the RTS tradition of resource harvesting and management, building construction, and unit purchasing, replacing it with a streamlined tactical gameplay experience, focusing on battle tactics and objectives. Players are given a certain number of units at the beginning of a mission, and it is up to them to "earn" additional units by accomplishing primary and secondary objectives. Primary objectives, of course, must be completed to accomplish a mission, whereas secondary objectives are not required, but will usually earn extra units, such as a new M1 tank. There are tactical aids such as artillery bombardment and laser-guided bombs which can be employed to aid the player's strategic scenario, but it is rarely actually required.

Unlike traditional RTS games such as Supreme Commander which are huge in scale, allowing the player to commit literally hundreds of units to combat, the World in Conflict campaign is decidedly less epic, giving the player control of usually not more than a dozen or so units. This focus on small-scale battles makes this game unique in the current RTS landscape, sharing the Real-Time Tactical stage with only a handful of other games, such as Company of Heroes and Ground Control (another Massive production).

For larger scale battles, World in Conflict supports up to 16 players in various multiplayer modes, and each commander can specialize in a different type of combat role, such as support, infantry, and armor. Multiplayer teams can coordinate roles and assist each other, essentially creating one large military force. Even in the single-player campaign, the player is merely a part of a larger team, and is frequently called upon to give fire support or logistical support to other parts of the campaign team.

DirectX 10 in World in Conflict

Using Massive's proprietary Masstech Engine, World in Conflict supports "advanced lighting and physics effects", including deforming terrain. That is basically all that Sierra's propaganda machine tells us about it. We know that it supports DirectX 10 out of the box, by way of an enigmatic graphics option labeled "Use DirectX 10 Rendering" in the graphics configuration interface of the game. Part of the purpose of this evaluation is to determine precisely what DirectX 10 (and, by extension, Windows Vista) brings to the table in World in Conflict. When the "Use DirectX 10 Rendering" option is enabled, it enables another option labeled "Shadows from Clouds," but that appears to be the only major difference.

Testing

We will be testing World in Conflict on five different video cards, representing the Enthusiast and Performance classes from both ATI and NVIDIA. All of our performance tests will be on an apples-to-apples foundation, but we will also provide our highest playable settings. Finally, we will provide image quality comparisons to outline the differences between DirectX 10 and DirectX 9 in World in Conflict.