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- Date:
- Monday , November 05, 2007
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Gears of War PC Performance and IQ
Gears of War is being released on the PC this week and we’ve got an exclusive look at performance and image quality in this game under Windows Vista in DX10. We test the GeForce 8800 GTX, GTS, and GT along with the Radeon HD 2900 XT. We cover DX9 vs. DX10 and best gameplay experience.
Gears of War
(DirectX 9/10)
Gears of War for Windows runs on both Windows XP and Windows Vista running under the Unreal Engine 3 gaming engine. Under Windows Vista you will be able to run in DirectX 9 or DirectX 10 with an easy to select in-game option. There is one single graphics menu in the game shown below.
Menu Options
From here you can select screen resolution and options such as post processing, texture quality, character detail, shadow detail, and visual effects detail. At the bottom you will see an option that says “DirectX 10/Antialiasing.” This option has three selections, “Off”, “On” and “On/Antialiasing.” When this option is “Off” the game will not use the DX10 rendering path, and as such you will not be able to use antialiasing. We tried forcing AA from the control panel on all video cards and it had no effect in the game.
DX10 On
When this option is “On” you will be running in the DX10 code path, however this will still not allow you to force antialiasing on. We tried forcing AA with DX10 “On” on all video cards and received no antialiasing benefits at all. It is possible future driver versions will provide this support as we were able to force AA in the Unreal Tournament 3 demo with the latest NVIDIA drivers.
DX10 On/Antialiasing
In order to receive antialiasing you must select the “On/Antialiasing” option. When this option is selected the game will use 4X AA by default. There are no in-game options to change the level of AA being used. We looked at the “WarEngineUserSettings.ini” file (which contains user quality settings) and found that “MaxMultisamples=4” was being used. We tried to change this value to 2 but every time we started the game it defaulted back to 4. We also tried overriding AA from the control panel but this did not work either. Therefore the only AA option we had available to us was the default 4X AA with the DX10 On/Antialiasing option. There are also no in-game options for selecting the anisotropic filtering level, but we found success in forcing 16X AF from the control panel on each video card.
Testing
For our testing in DX10 we are using the DX10 “On” option and using “On/Antialiasing” where 4X AA was playable. For DX9 testing the DX10 option is “Off.” We found that every setting in the game was playable at the highest levels on all video cards except for “Texture Quality” as we will explain below. On some video cards we had to set this to “Medium” in order to smooth out gameplay. Our run-through consists of a playing for over five minutes on Act 5 “Impasse” single player game. We performed a lot of zooming in and shooting the baddies down to a bloody pulp, so all game effects were in play. This game, like Unreal Tournament 3 has a rendering framerate cap around 62 FPS, you will see all the graphs max out at the cap.
DirectX 10
For these tests below we will enable DX10 to “On” and if playable also use “DX10/Antialiasing” to enable 4X AA.
The only video card in DX10 mode that had enough performance to enable 4X AA (DX10 On/Antialiasing) at 1600x1200 was the GeForce 8800 GTX. It maintained an average of 40 FPS. It did drop below 30 FPS for an extended amount of time, but this was during the most intense fight scenes and the game still felt very playable at these levels on the GeForce 8800 GTX. If this is utterly unacceptable to you, disabling AA will bring the framerates way up.
Unfortunately we cannot force 2X AA in this game which would have been a better compromise of performance and image quality. The GeForce 8800 GTX video card will also let you play easily at 1920x1200 with DX10 “On” but no AA. This was also the only video card that allowed us to play at 2560x1600 with all settings at their highest and DX10 “On”, sans AA.
The GeForce 8800 GT performed well in this game, but it just didn’t have what it takes to enable 4X AA in Gears of War at 1600x1200. Though without AA, as you can see, performance is very high beating the 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS. If you really want AA you can drop the resolution to 1280x1024 and then enable DX10 “On/Antialiasing” for 4X AA. The GeForce 8800 GT also allowed smooth gameplay at 1920x1200 without AA, in DX10. At 2560x1600 in DX10 mode though he GeForce 8800 GT did struggle at the highest game settings. If you lower some of the in-game settings, such as Texture Quality, Shadows and Post Processing then it would be playable at 2560x1600 with DX10 “On.”
The 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS also did well, with the same playable settings as the GeForce 8800 GT at 1600x1200 NoAA/16X AF, though it did have overall lower framerates. With DX10 “On” the GeForce 8800 GTS did struggle slightly at 1920x1200, but not horribly enough to have to lower game settings. There was no way though the 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS was going to run at 2560x1600 with DX10 “On”, it was simply to slow, you’d have to lower basically every in-game setting just to get near playable performance at this resolution. The better option with the GTS is to run in DX9 mode if you wish to play at 2560x1600. At 2560x1600 the GeForce 8800 GT’s superior texture and stream processor performance shines through over the GeForce 8800 GTS, even though the 512 MB 8800 GT has less RAM.
The GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB and Radeon HD 2900 XT really had a problem in this game running with Texture Quality at “Highest.” It is odd because the Radeon HD 2900 XT has 512 MB of RAM, same as the GeForce 8800 GT, but it ran worse than the 320 MB GeForce 8800 GTS with DX10 “On.” When we set Texture Quality to “High” or “Highest” on both video cards the game would become very ‘choppy’, behaving as it if were running out of local memory storage and texturing out to the hard drive.
By reducing the Texture Quality to “Medium” on both video cards this smoothed out the gameplay and we could enjoy the game; at “High” or “Highest” textures the game was unplayable due to this hitching and pausing. We have a graph on the following page comparing “Medium” and “Highest” Texture Quality setting so you can see exactly what it looks like graphed out.
We also had to lower the Radeon HD 2900 XT to 1280x1024, the performance just wasn’t there with this card in DX10 to run this game at playable framerates at 1600x1200. We will also show a graph comparing DX9 and DX10 performance on this video card on the following page.
DirectX 9
For these tests below we will set DX10 to “Off”, as such no antialiasing is supported in this mode.
With the DX10 option to “Off” we found framerates to be much higher compared to DX10 “On.” Unfortunately, since AA is not supported in DX9 mode all we can do is bask in the glory of higher framerates that DX9 mode provides. For every video card the playable setting was 1600x1200 NoAA/16X AF with highest settings except for the 320 MB GeForce 8800 GTS and Radeon HD 2900 XT once again. With these two video cards we had no choice but to drop their Texture Quality to “Medium.” At “High” or “Highest” Texture Quality there was too much texture hitching which caused the game to be unplayable.
One thing DX9 mode will allow is some of these cards to perform very well at high resolutions. For example the Radeon HD 2900 XT is now playable at 1600x1200 in DX9 where it was only playable at 1280x1024 in DX10. Both the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GT were playable up to 2560x1600 NoAA/16XAF with maximum in-game settings in DX9. The GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB handled 1920x1200 NoAA/16X AF very well but tended to struggle as far as framerates go at 2560x1600. It seems the extra stream processors and texture capability the 8800 GT has made a big difference in this game, allowing 2560x1600 to be very playable. The Radeon HD 2900 XT also played well at 1920x1200, but you do have to keep that Texture Quality setting at “Medium.” We look at image quality in a couple of pages to see how “Medium” Texture Quality compares to “Highest” Texture Quality.