Perfect World

At first sight this game looks like Lineage II until you take a deeper look into its gameplay. In fact, the only thing the two games have in common is the engine, but with a generation gap: Perfect World runs in a greatly modified Unreal Engine 1. Instead of a typical fantasy setting with orcs and elves, Perfect World draws upon Chinese mythology, which might be expected considering the country of origin of that game.

The game world is all about flying. Every race – winged elves, humans and untamed – all can fly. The elves can fly natively while the others can only do that from level 30. The game offers a more flexible system for character appearance customization than what you find in Lineage II and has a huge number of interesting quests that help you grow your character up without wiping out hordes after hordes of identical monsters.

Using the first-generation Unreal Engine, Perfect World looks more archaic than Lineage II, yet it is neither ugly nor primitive. It has high-resolution textures and shows detailed and nice-looking landscapes. How fast are our inexpensive graphics cards in it?

Surprisingly, the game is rather demanding at the maximum graphics quality settings despite its old Unreal Engine. The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition cannot offer a playable bottom speed even at 1280x1024. The Radeon HD 4770 and HD 4850 give up at 1680x1050. And at a resolution of 1920x1200 none of the cards, including the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, can keep the frame rate above 25fps. ATI’s solutions provide a higher bottom speed, so they are preferable for playing Perfect World. There is no difference between the Radeon HD 4770 and Radeon HD 4850.