Truth be told, we were a bit worried about Carrier Command: Gaea Mission. You see, Bohemia is a talented team there is no doubt about that. However, their engine was seriously bugged – back in the days of ArmA 2 and Take on Helicopters – and suffered from a lot of performance issues. Well, good news guys as the remake of Carrier Command uses a different engine that runs amazingly well. This newly, in-house engine, is GPU bound and did not stress our CPU even when there were firefights on-screen. Way to go Bohemia. Continue reading Carrier Command: Gaea Mission – Beta Performance Analysis→
We always liked Bugbear’s games. FlatOut was a great arcade racing series and run flawlessly in a lot of PC system configurations. Naturally, we thought that Ridge Racer: Unbounded would live up to the standards that were set by the Finish studio. Sadly though, what we have in our hands is a shoddy console port of a really promising game. Not only, that, but Ridge Racer: Unbounded suffers from all the flaws and issues that plagued the entire FlatOut series. Yes, there is rubber band and yes the controls are a mess, especially if you try to play the game with the keyboard, something that was no issue with the FlatOut games. Continue reading Ridge Racer: Unbounded PC Performance Analysis→
Biart Studios have released their first indie third-person shooter title, Deep Black: Reloaded. The game was initially known as U-Wars and was meant to take advantage of Nvidia’s PhysX and 3D Vision. Back when it was called U-Wars, the developers had trouble finding a publisher. Fast forward a couple of years and here we are with Biart’s renamed game that is published by them in a digital form. Given its indie nature, we were wondering whether or not it was worth writing a Performance Analysis about it. However, we got intrigued when we found out that it was a 3D-Ready title, so we felt the need to give it a shot. As always, we used an overclocked Q9650 with a GTX295, 4GB RAM, Windows 7-64Bit and the latest version of Nvidia’s ForceWare drivers. Continue reading Deep Black: Reloaded PC Performance Analysis→
Let me start by saying that Starbreeze is a talented studio. After the amazing Chronicles of Riddick and the first Darkness game, we were expecting big things from them. However, something is really off with their latest games. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena was not something special and Syndicate feels like a generic FPS that basically mixes Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s style and FEAR’s combat mechanics. But we are not here to judge its gameplay. And ironically, although the game feels like a big let down, its game engine is awesome and performs great on the PC. Continue reading Syndicate PC Performance Analysis→
Alan Wake is a game that a lot of PC gamers have been waiting for. Some people think that the game changed from an open-world title to a linear horror action adventure due to X360’s exclusivity, but that is not true. First, we’ve seen open-world titles in X360 so Remedy wouldn’t have any – technical – issue with developing such a title for Microsoft’s console. Truth is that the open-world tech demo simply didn’t work. It was cool but as a horror game, it just couldn’t work. Therefore, Remedy decided to make it more linear and offer the experience they have been targeting for all this time. Quick forward two years and here we are, with its PC version finally hitting our platform. Alan Wake has been released for the PC, so it’s time now to see how Remedy’s little gem performs on a modern-day PC. Continue reading Alan Wake PC Performance Analysis→
The Darkness II has just been released on the PC, and it’s time to see how Digital Extremes’ little baby performs on our beloved platform. Some of you might be initially disappointed with the fact that the game is not developed by Starbreeze, developers of the first part, but from what we’ve seen so far, The Darkness II performs amazingly good on a lot of PCs and is quite friendly to low-end PC configurations. This is not surprising at all as the game uses Digital Extremes’ in-house engine, the Evolution Engine, that was used to Dark Sector, a third-person game that was also well optimized. Continue reading The Darkness II PC Performance Analysis→
Okay, this is a game for which we really wanted to write a performance analysis. Given the fact that Rocksteady was preparing a patch for it, we decided to hold off and see whether the update would introduce any performance boost to the DX9 path. Unfortunately though, Batman: Arkham City is an un-optimized mess when it comes to its PhysX implementation. In other words, Rocksteady relied on PC’s additional raw power to overcome any performance issues. This is not shocking at all as Rocksteady used an old version of the PhysX SDK. But let’s start with our analysis, shall we? Continue reading Batman: Arkham City PC Performance Analysis→
At last, Croteam’s old-school FPS is finally here with us and it’s time to see how this bad boy performs with a modern-day PC. As usual, we used an overclocked Q9650 at 4.2Ghz, 4GB RAM and a GTX295 with Windows 7 64-Bit and Nvidia’s latest ForceWare drivers. First things first though; we have to congratulate Croteam for all those graphical options that are available. PC gamers can tweak pretty much everything, from the parallax occlusion mapping quality to the textures’ quality and the LOD amount. These are by far the best in-game options we’ve ever seen and every developer should take a good look at them. Continue reading Serious Sam 3: BFE PC Performance Analysis→
Modern Warfare 3 has been out for two weeks, and we felt the need to provide you with a performance analysis for it. The reason for our delay is quite simple; Activision hasn’t provided us with a review code, so we had to purchase it ourselves. This also explains why we’ve covered games like Jurassic Park and JANE’s Advanced Strike Fighters before most of triple-A games. When a publisher/developer sends us a review code, it will be covered immediately, whether it’s a triple-A game or not. Continue reading Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 PC Performance Analysis→
Saints Row: The Third is out now, and it’s time to see how this bad boy performs with a modern-day PC. Volition has stated that this is not a console port and although that might be true, we are really puzzled with its abnormal performance. We’re pretty sure that AMD/ATI will obviously know that it is a technical mess. This performance analysis, however, shows that Nvidia users will also encounter various issues with this game, especially if they want to run it in SLI mode. Continue reading Saints Row: The Third PC Performance Analysis→
