Obduction: PC Performance Benchmarks for Graphics Cards and Processors

 

Release Date : August 24, 2016
Genre : Adventure, 3D, 1st Person
Developer : Cyan Inc.
Publisher : Cyan Inc.

Daily life has come to an end. After a fateful encounter with an organic artifact that has fallen from the sky, you find yourself in a distant world that seems both alien and surprisingly familiar. As if some part of the Earth was transferred here, stuck in a fantastic landscape among giant machines, unknown technologies and unusual creatures. Trying to uncover the secrets of this mysterious place and understand why you are here, you gradually find neighboring worlds full of their own secrets and traces of former inhabitants. Explore, discover, solve and make difficult decisions - from now on it's your story!

Obduction is a brand new first-person real-time adventure powered by Unreal Engine 4 that carries the spirit and image of other legendary Cyan games: Myst and Riven. Obduction resurrects those incredible feelings that you experience when you realize that you find yourself in a completely different world that you can explore, learn about and eventually become part of it. An important innovation is that the developers have set as their goal to abandon the rendering of backgrounds in videos, and the story itself will be told directly through the gameplay. As a true successor to Myst, Obduction uses the same storytelling and world-building principles, which means there are plenty of live action encounters along the way. The boundaries of reality, fantasy and dreams are often blurred and,

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.

Obduction is only supported on Windows 7/8/10. Other operating systems are currently not supported by developers and are unlikely to receive support. 

 

The priority and primary graphics API for Obduction is  DirectX 11 .

Obduction is based on the Unreal Engine 4 game engine developed and maintained by Epic Games. this is the first game created on this engine and should simply amaze everyone with stunning graphics. The developers, judging by the screenshots, would have been quite praised for the previous versions of the engine, as well. in the foreground in the horror genre is not a picture. It is important to establish artificial intelligence, called the Director (eng. AI Director), which affects the gameplay, adjusting to the level of the players and changing the game parameters.

Thanks to his work, each playthrough of the game is unique and inimitable, which increases the replayability of the game. The first game created on the engine - Unreal - appeared in 1998. Since then, various versions of this game engine have been used in over a hundred games, including Deus Ex, Dishonored, Lineage II, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Postal 2, the Brothers in Arms series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, as well as in the well-known game series Unreal and Unreal Tournament from Epic Games themselves. Being adapted primarily for first-person shooters, the engine was also used to create games of other genres.  

Written in the high-level C++ language, Unreal Engine 4 allows you to create games for most operating systems and platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Mac OS X, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube. In December, Mark Rein demonstrated Unreal Engine 3 on the iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS. In March 2010, the engine was demonstrated on the Palm Pre communicator based on the webOS mobile platform.

 

To simplify porting, the engine uses a modular system of dependent components: supports various rendering systems (Direct3D, OpenGL, Pixomatic; previously supported Glide API, S3 Metal, PowerVR SGL), sound playback (EAX, OpenAL, DirectSound3D; previously supported A3D), voice playback tools text, speech recognition (only for Xbox360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Windows, also planned for Linux and Mac), modules for networking and support for various input devices.

For online play, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and GameSpy technologies are supported, including up to 64 players (clients) at the same time. Despite the fact that the development tools do not officially include support for a large number of clients on a single server, the engine has been used to create MMORPG games. One of the most famous representatives of the genre, Lineage II, uses the Unreal Engine. 

Obduction has a sufficient range of graphic settings. Both basic and advanced settings are available to us.

  

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum and maximum graphics quality settings. 

The difference between the minimum and maximum settings is noticeable even to the naked eye.

Activating anti-aliasing completely eliminates all surface irregularities, but a little soaps the picture.

The graphics in Obduction are not bad, but no more than what Unreal Engine 4 has to offer at the current level . Quest fans will like it, as this is the best picture of all the few games in this genre.

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

 

Our video cards were tested at 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 resolutions with Ultra graphics quality settings. AMD CrossFireX and SLI  are not supported by the game. 

Testing at very high  quality settings 1920x1080

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal solutions will be  video cards of the level Radeon HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 770.

 

Testing at very high  quality settings 2560x1440

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 280X or GeForce GTX 770 level showed an acceptable FPS.  The best solutions would be  video cards of the Radeon R9 290 or GeForce GTX 770 level.

 

Testing at very high quality settings 3840x2160

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 Nano or GeForce GTX 980 level showed an acceptable FPS.  The best solutions would be video cards of the adeon R9 Fury X or  GeForce GTX 980 Ti level. 

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA were taken as the indicator at resolutions of  1920x1080 and 2560x1440 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for 1920x1080 resolution will be 4096  MB of video memory, for 2560x1440 resolution - 6144 MB of video memory and for 3840x2160 resolution about 6144 MB of video memory. 

  

We tested processor dependence on 16 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of the video card for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080. Below is a video of the test segment : 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080

 

Processor performance in the game is sufficient for all models. 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel % 

 

Loading of processor cores  at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD % 

 

Obduction involves up to 6 computational threads.

The test was conducted on the base configuration Core i 7 5960X @ 4.6 GHz with the amount of pre-installed memory 32 GB DDR4 2400 MGz. All used RAM was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, at various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Obduction was in the range of 2800-4000 megabytes.

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

With a 6 GB system, Obduction consumed all 5.8 GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 6.4 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, total memory consumption was almost 7 GB. And with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the system consumes 7.5  gigabytes of RAM.