Command & Conquer ALPHA – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Release date: 2013, the
Genre: RTS/MMO
developer: BioWare Victory
Publisher: EA

 

Command & Conquer is a real-time strategy game from the Command & Conquer series, and is a continuation of Command & Conquer: Generals. Announced for 2013. The first game in the series to be developed by Bioware Victory, making them the third developer in the series, after Westwood Studios and EA Los Angeles.

World leaders have gathered to sign a treaty that will end all wars. However, the terrorist attack that occurred destroys the conference participants. In a world where there are no more politicians, diplomats or social activists, only Generals remain. It is up to you to take control of the public and put an end to global terrorism once and for all.

THE GRAFICAL PART

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

Supported OS and graphics API

Command & Conquer is supported by major Windows operating systems, which include Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers. 

 

The preferred and main graphics API for the multiplayer game Command & Conquer is DirectX 11. The game runs through the Origin digital service.

Game engine

Command & Conquer is based on the Frostbite 2.0 game engine, which was developed by DICE almost from scratch. Let us remind you that Frostbite 2.0 was originally created to work with DirectX 11, but DirectX 10 is also supported. DirectX 9 is not supported, so Windows XP is not suitable for the game. Particular attention from the developers was paid to DirectX 11 effects, improved character animation and advanced physics effects.

The game uses hardware-based terrain tessellation, which allows for more rendered triangles to be rendered at a high level of detail entirely on the GPU. Thus, little memory is used, and the GPU itself turns low-resolution data into detailed, realistic images. In a typical BF3 scene, 923 thousand triangles of the environment are drawn in tessellation. Without tessellation, there are only 101 thousand of them. The LOD (level of detail in tessellation) algorithm is adaptive in screen space. Therefore, the scene constantly applies consistently high detail geometry.

The extra detail eliminates the obvious straight edges of polygons, creating a more defined and natural scene, especially on skyline outlines. The detailing of landscape deformations, such as craters, is also improved. The LOD tessellation algorithm is continuous. Details change smoothly between levels as the viewpoint moves. This way, there are no big jumps when switching between levels of detail in the environment.

Advanced Game Settings

Command & Conquer ALPHA has virtually no graphical settings in its arsenal. In the graphical submenu, we can only change the game resolution or choose in which mode to run the game – windowed or full screen.

 

 We hope that the developers will add more graphic settings for more flexible manipulation of game performance.

General visual design and game physics

Command & Conquer is an ALPHA version of the product, and it’s still quite early to talk about the graphics component. But even what we saw is quite enough to call this game one of the most beautiful in this genre. We’ll talk more about the game when it reaches later builds.

 

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as performance indicators. Below is a video of the test segment: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1vUnEjDxzA

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes of 1920×1080 and 2560×1600. Multi-chip SLI and CrossFireX configurations have performance issues. TITAN was not included in testing because when loading a game it constantly crashed with a driver error. The game has an internal FPS limit of 30 frames.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, an acceptable and sufficient level of performance was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The optimal video cards will be HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 580 solutions.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600 

 

 At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings, an acceptable level of performance was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 7850 level or GeForce GTX 660. The optimal video cards will be HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660 solutions.

 You can notice. that the game is more optimized for the latest generation of video cards, which show more significant performance than their predecessors.

VRAM test

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 with different anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for this game is about 1536 MB for various graphics quality settings. 

CPU test

 

We tested processor dependence on 17 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those modes where the value of video cards for the game was minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920×1080.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 

 

The game has an FPS limit of 30 frames, so it doesn’t matter whether the processor is Intel or AMD.

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 Intel%

 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 AMD%

 

As we can see, the game uses a maximum of 2 cores. The FPS limitation prevents the cores from reaching their full potential.

RAM test

Testing of the RAM consumed by the game was carried out by monitoring directly through the Windows task manager. The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 [email protected] GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

The amount of RAM consumed in Command & Conquer ALPHA is at least 900 megabytes. Thus, for a comfortable game you need to have 2 minimum GB of RAM installed in your PC. 

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