Saints Row: The Third APU Performance Test

Year of release:  2011
Genre:  Action, racing
Developer:  Volition
Publisher:  THQ
Publisher in Russia:  Akella

Saints Row: The Third is a non-linear third-person shooter video game developed by Volition, Inc. The game was released on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. On November 3, a free character generator called "Initiation Station" appeared on the Steam network, which allows you to create your own alter ego and put it on public display to the official community, and subsequently use it in the game.

 The game was released on November 15, 2011 in the US and Europe.

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

Saints Row: The Third is supported by major Windows operating systems, which include Windows XP/Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/10. Other operating systems are currently not supported by developers and will not receive support. 

The priority and primary graphics API for Saints Row: The Third is  DirectX 11 .

The game is based on the "Geo Mod 2.5" game engine, which is a multi-platform game engine capable of running on IBM PC-compatible computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game consoles. "Geo Mod" is also a multi-threaded engine, minimal the number of threads is two, so it is not capable of running on single-threaded systems.

These two most important threads are graphics and physics processing. At the same time, in the case of using a PC, an increase in the number of computational threads available in the system will not lead to a noticeable improvement in performance. In the case of consoles, additional optimizations have been made to maximize the use of all available resources, including additional threads.

All versions of the graphics engine support many common graphics effects and technologies: High Dynamic Range Rendering, soft shadows, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, volumetric rays, refraction effects for heat and camouflage, and many other effects. The particle system allows you to create smoke, dust, fire flames and small fragments. The PC version of the graphics engine supports SLI and CrossFire technologies.

The difference between AMD and Intel solutions is almost imperceptible.

Testing at  low  quality settings 1280x720

This time Intel is much faster than AMD...

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results were taken on  Core i 7 5775C and AMD A10-7870K systems at 1920x1080  resolutions   with high quality settings.

Testing at low  memory GPU quality settings 

At a resolution of 1280x720, the APU's video memory consumption is 500  MB of video memory. 

Loading of processor cores  at low quality settings 1280x720  % 

When using integrated graphics solutions, the game is capable of supporting up to 8 computational threads. 

 

The test was conducted on the base configurations Core i 7 5775C and AMD A10-7870K with 8 GB DDR3/4 2666 MGz pre-installed memory. The test of RAM on the entire system was carried out without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing system RAM consumption 

If you have a system with  a Core i 7 5775C, the game  consumes 2 gigabytes of RAM. In the presence of a system based on  AMD A10-7870K,  the RAM consumption of all RAM was also 2 gigabytes.