Performance in Homeworld 2

Homeworld 2 is a classical 3D strategy game repeating the well-known predecessor, Homeworld. There are no outstanding special effects in this game, however, the scenes are really beautiful all the way.

Homeworld 2 depends on the CPU really severely, so that you can actually see the performance differences caused by the use of different graphics cards only in the rare “moments of peace” between the battles, in relatively “calm” missions or in the intro-movies for the new levels. All the rest of the time the engine is busy calculating the enemy’s AI, gaming physics and logic, so that the benchmark results are limited by the CPU performance a lot.

Nevertheless, the game also proved to be loading graphics cards quite heavily. Therefore, being a real Homeworld fan, I couldn’t resist the temptation and test the cards in one of my favorites. :)

The graphics quality settings were set to maximum. The dynamic control of models complexity (in other words, making the models simpler as the distance to them increases) was disabled. The tests were run in two modes: with and without shadows. Anisotropic filtering  and anti-aliasing were disabled, because the former doesn’t make sense for a game like that and the latter doesn’t work on NVIDIA graphics cards with driver version 52.16. the tests were run in a scripted scene in the beginning of the second game level with the help of Fraps utility.

Here are the results:

The graphics cards on ATI’s chips are ahead of the NVIDIA’s rivals. Homeworld 2 is a convenient application for them, because most objects in the scene use maximum one texturing layer, which is ideal for ATI chips with 8 pixel pipelines with one texturing unit in each.

When the shadows were enabled the situation changes: in all resolutions up to 1600x1200 NVIDIA solutions are ahead. Probably the gaming engine uses a stencil buffer for shadows calculation and NVIDIA chips build stencil buffers twice as quickly, involving 8 pixel pipelines.

ATI chips seem to be calculating the shadows in a different way. Firstly, the benchmark results show that the performance difference in various resolutions is very small, i.e. the graphics card performance is no bottleneck here. Secondly, the external shadows by ATI chips look a little different in Homeworld 2.

So, with the maximum quality settings and with enabled shadows NVIDIA graphics cards win in Homeworld 2 test.