Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach

Established back in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is considered one of the oldest role-playing games. There were no mass-produced personal computers then, the primitive Altair 8800 only came out a year later. Thus, the D&D universe is a time-tested classic of table RPGs, but it also came to the PC eventually. There is a lot of games based on its setting including such famous titles as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights. With D&D enjoying such huge popularity, it had to be made into a MMORPG. Such a game was announced officially on the 28th of February, 2008.

Of course, the game is lacking in the beauty of visual effects and level of detail by the standards of 2009 but, as we have said in the introduction, the quality of graphics is far from being the decisive factor in favor of a particular MMORPG. And despite its age, the game proved to be quite resource-consuming:

The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition could only cope with D&D Online when we turned FSAA of. When 4x FSAA was enabled, the card’s bottom speed dropped below 25fps – in a rather easy scene. The other cards behave better, though. It is only the weakest solutions like the Radeon HD 4830 and GeForce 9600 GT that cannot provide a playable frame rate at 1920x1200 with FSAA. As usual, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 has no rivals but you should only purchase it if you want to play other, more demanding, games.