World in Conflict Beta Performance

Great, another Bioware. From their known issues:

 

What I mean is that I've followed the threads on this and know that the developer is aware of and intends to look at the issues that are present, I can't can't vouch for what they are doing from a performance perspective as I have no visibility on that.

 

I'm here to defend Hanners' honor.

Not the article, b/c I wasn't able to access it yesterday and haven't gathered the courage to try again. See what happens when you release exclusive content? It clogs your server with click-happy bastards of any stripe!

 

Pistols at dawn then?

 

You can't defend what doesn't exist.

Anyway (if the images load!) here's a quick comparison of DirectX 10 performance on the GeForce 8800GTS 640MB between the latest WHQL driver and the beta driver released to coincide with the World in Conflict open beta launch:





DirectX 9 performance was unchanged between the two drivers.

 

Hanners,

Any chance we could see some benchmark results from a 8800 GTX or Ultra?

Thanks for the article btw.......I've been playing the Beta and loving every minute of it!

 

Nice to know, thanks Hanners for going that extra mile.

 

I would if I had one to hand - Unfortunately, I haven't right now.

 

As long as everyone appears at dawn, local time, chances are we'll all survive unscathed.

I was counting on that!

Speaking of which, props for using ignominy, but deductions for the [sic].

Thanks for the extra info. I think benchmarking a publicly available beta is worthwhile. The beta testers are gaming on something, and if they can't get playable framerates they're probably not going to spend much time hammering the DX10 path. Unless Massive went out of their way to make ATI look bad--say, by coding specifically for G80 without a thought to R600--then there's value in knowing if ATI's lagging in an area. Even if they coded a DX10 path to G80 simply b/c R600 wasn't available to them at the time, it's still useful to know. If nothing else, it'll prompt ATI to fix the problem that much faster.

I understand v_s' objection, that it's too early to declare a winner given these conditions (beta game and drivers), but I don't agree with the unstated assumption that people need to be spoon-fed everything. They can read the article next to the text and arrive at the obvious conclusion: that it's a beta, both cards are still relatively new, R600 and DX10 paths are newer, and performance should be expected to improve--but that ATI should also be expected to offer performance comparable to NV even at this early and presumably unoptimized (in the best sense of the word) stage. It's just one more data point for consumers to consider.

Looking at the second pair of screenshots, is it a fluke that the DX10 one looks sharper? The facing river bank and buildings and even trees (more aliasing) look much clearer. Otherwise, I struggled to spot a difference, even knowing smoke is supposedly fancified.

 

Even if the actual numbers turn out to be irrelevant when the game is published 2 months later, I (and certainly a lot of others with me) still find them interesting if only to see the performance evolution of the drivers and/or the game.

What you have basically been saying is that such benchmarks should not be published because 'ordinary' readers are too stupid to understand that it's a beta. I hope I'm smart enough to filter raw information myself, thank you. If you consider the current numbers inconvenient, you're more than welcome to ignore them. Just don't advocate to deny the numbers to others.

BTW, Hanners, thank you very much for those numbers. Not having the necessary hardware to check it out myself, I was really happy to see some results. (And I love the name of your site! )

 

Interesting.

 

Try benching it @ High detail and then Medium.

You get a decent gain moving down from Very high to High, and a large gain moving from Very high or High to Medium on a GTX.

Medium should be very playable for most folks under DX 9.

 

Developer respond:

"I'd like to point out that the DX10 benchmark results on ATI hardware are probably misleading at this stage. We have worked closely with NVIDIA for a long time to achieve the results you are seeing on their cards. We expect to see improvements on the ATI cards soon, some of them should be seen in the next Beta Patch."

 

Misleading for future performance, perhaps, but surely not for present performance on the open beta.

 

Looks like many "DX 10" games are just going to be DX 9 games with a few enhancement thrown on top. If they were "ground up" DX 10 design we'd probably be seeing better performance.

It is delightful when you stumble over a well coded title, and that is very rare.

 

How many DX9 games aren't DX7 or DX8 games with some kind of DX9 gloss applied?

Jawed

 

Probably those that can't run on DX8 hardware.

And a glossed DX9 title, with a kind of DX10 patch -- I think will be too much glossy already, even to gaze at it.

Anyway, I think that for the current DX9 (SM3) pathways, the speed-up options of moving to plain DX10 patching are almost exhausted. Nothing even close to the FarCry case back then, with a simple adding of a single-pass lightning shader and other similar tweaks.

 

Sad but true. Interesting look at this title, much appreciated .

 

I find the DX9 performance to show an interesting difference between the 8600GTS and the 2600xt.

Most game benchmarks show the 8600GTS to beat the 2600xt every time. See anything at: http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=858&model2=854&chart=296

But for the first time, in these WIC benchmarks, I see the 2600xt beat the 8600gts much of the time. (higher max and average here for instance http://www.elitebastards.com/hanners/wic-beta/charts/dx9-12x10.png )

That WIC is an Nvidia-optimized game only adds to the surprise!