The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings (2011) APU Performance Test

Release Date : 2011
Genre : RPG, 3D, 3rd Person
Developer : CD Projekt RED
Publisher : Namco Bandai Games

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is a computer role-playing game developed by the Polish company CD Projekt RED based on the Witcher series of novels by the famous Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, a sequel to the 2007 The Witcher computer game.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings takes place shortly after the events of The Witcher and also takes place in the world of Andrzej Sapkowski's books. The main character is still the witcher Geralt of Rivia. According to Andrzej Sapkowski, he did not take part in the development of the game's plot and did not even know about its creation.2

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.

The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings is supported on major Windows operating systems, including 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 The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings is  DirectX 9 .

The first part of The Witcher was based on the Aurora Engine technology, a game engine developed by the Canadian company BioWare and first used in the computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights, which was released on June 18, 2002. Of course, even by the standards of 2007, the Aurora Engine was an outdated graphics technology and it is clear that the new part of the The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings series needed an updated graphics engine. And they became RED Engine.

 This engine focuses not only on graphics and physics, but also on building a non-linear quest system, allowing you to make the gameplay even closer to real life. RED Engine supports dynamic shadows, normal mapping and parallax. The version of the RED Engine in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings only supports DirectX 9, which somewhat hampered the game in terms of manufacturability.

The first gameplay of The Witcher 2 appeared long before the release, namely back in 2009. And in the video below, you can see what  the RED Engine looked like two years before the game was released:

The difference between AMD and Intel solutions is almost imperceptible.

Our APUs were tested at  1280x720 resolution with the lowest  graphics quality settings allowed by the game. 

  

Testing at  low  quality settings 1280x720

 

Even at low graphics settings, the processors are working at the limit of their capabilities...

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 4.5 gigabytes of RAM. In the presence of a system based on  AMD A10-7870K,  the RAM consumption of all RAM also amounted to 3 gigabytes.