X-bit labs

Seven Friends of a Gamer: GPUs vs. Games Spring 2007 (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 03/30/2007 | 12:55 PM ]

Performance in Neverwinter Nights 2

All lovers of role-play games will surely appreciate Neverwinter Nights 2. Unlike games of the increasingly more popular third-person RPG genre, it puts a whole team of characters, each with unique habits and abilities, under your control. Complex relations between the team members, sophisticated quests, an exciting plot, and a rich selection of weaponry – you’ll find all this in Neverwinter Nights 2.

The game’s visuals are made on a high technical level, with the ensuing consequences for the graphics subsystem. The release of a new official patch has made it possible to enable full-screen in NWN2 and we benchmarked the Premium, High-End and Performance-Mainstream cards in the eye candy mode.

Premium/High-End Class

Fortunately, the specifics of the NWN 2 gameplay make this game enjoyable even at an average performance of 25-30fps with a minimum of 15fps. It is only when the speed bottoms out below the latter point that you can experience problems with control (your commands may be ignored, some actions may be skipped over, etc).

Like in the previous tests the GeForce 8800 GTX occupies first place, allowing the gamer to enjoy Neverwinter Nights 2 fully even in 1920x1200 resolution (the maximum for GeForce 8800 GTS is 1600x1200). The GeForce 7950 GX2 is quite fast for playing in resolutions up to 1280x1024 inclusive, but its speed plummets to below acceptable in 1600x1200.

The Radeon X1950 XTX cannot yield 25fps even at 1280x1024 while its minimum speed is so low that you are sure to have the problems described above.

Don’t forget we’re talking about the highest quality of graphics you can select in the game menu. You can increase speed by disabling shadows or refraction/reflection effects, but this will spoil the overall impression somewhat. Disabling 4x FSAA on top-end modern graphics cards does not provide a big speed gain in NWN 2, so you have only one solution left which is to reduce the display resolution.

And if the owners of flagship AMD products don’t want to compromise, they should either wait for the new-generation R600 based graphics cards or replace their solution with a GeForce 8800 GTX now. You shouldn’t put your stake on CrossFire or SLI technologies here as both work incorrectly with NWN 2, suffering a performance hit.

Performance-Mainstream Class

The game cannot be played with comfort on these graphics cards at the highest graphics quality settings because you can’t get an average frame rate higher than 20fps on a Performance-Mainstream or Mainstream solution.

GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, GeForce 7950 GT and Radeon X1900 XT perform at about the same level, the latter being slightly faster than the first two. At the same time, better value adapters, such as GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1950 Pro, perform at a low or very low level. Looks like it is enabled FSAA and very little onboard memory that affect the results. As we will see later on GeForce 7900 GS with enabled FSAA runs even slower than GeForce 7600 GT or Radeon X1650 XT without FSAA.

Mainstream Class

The GeForce 7600 GT and Radeon X1650 XT deliver pretty similar results, which are however too low for comfortable play. You can’t play this game on these cards without lowering the display resolution of the level of detail unless you upgrade your graphics card.