Of Orcs And Men – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2012
Genre: RPG
developer:  Cyanide/Spiders
Publishing house: 1C-SoftClub

 

Of Orcs and Men is a computer game in the RPG genre, which was released on October 12, 2012. The developers of the game are Cyanide and Spiders. The game was released on the platforms PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360. 

The game tells the story of the war between humans and orcs and goblins. The player will play on the side of the greenskins. An orc from the elite Bloodjaw Legion, a war veteran who has seen many battles, is given a task by an orc commander: to kill the man who is to blame for the start of the war, who for years has been urging people to kill and rob orcs and goblins. This man is the Emperor of People. This mission could change the course of the war.

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

Of Orcs And Men is supported by major Windows operating systems, which include Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and in the future Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers.

 

The priority and main graphics API for the multiplayer game Of Orcs And Men is DirectX 9, which is not a surprising factor since the game is multi-platform. The game is distributed through Steam, Valve’s digital distribution service.

Game engine

The game Of Orcs And Men is based on the Unreal Engine 3. The consequence of optimizing the game for modern PCs is improved performance on 64-bit OS and support for multi-core processors. UE3 was designed with personal computers using modern rendering systems (DirectX 9/10 and OpenGL 2/3) and next-generation consoles (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) in mind.

 

Due to the widespread use of multiprocessor systems, the engine uses two parallel main threads – the main thread (responsible primarily for gameplay) and the rendering thread. In addition to the two main threads, secondary threads can be called, which perform one-time tasks. There is now support for multi-threaded dynamic data loading (streaming), for example, loading a “location” directly while moving around it in order to save resources.

 

The updated graphics engine supports most modern technologies, including HDR, per-pixel lighting, dynamic shadows, shader model 4, geometry shaders. The graphics pipeline itself was transferred to the control of shaders. The Karma physics subsystem was abandoned in favor of another called PhysX from AGEIA. Later, AGEIA released a set of additional libraries for the game, allowing you to use all the capabilities of the physical system (such as the effect of “liquid” or fabric). The FaceFX mechanism is responsible for the animation of the characters’ faces.

 

Updated EAX version to 5th. Added SpeedTree support for tree generation. The emphasis was placed on additive geometry, but support for subtractive geometry was not abandoned. The disadvantage of subtractive geometry is primarily the much longer lighting calculation. New UnrealEd editor introduced, rewritten using wxWidgets

Advanced Game Settings

Of Orcs And Men, despite being multi-platform, has a fairly rich functionality of graphic settings. Below we have provided a screenshot of the game’s graphical submenu.

 

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

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

High quality settings

As we can see, the picture difference between graphic effects in different modes is practically indistinguishable. 

General visual design and game physics

Of Orcs And Men is a multi-platform project and is based on the rather outdated Unreal Engine 3, which has currently exhausted its technological capabilities. But even despite this, the designers did their best, presenting a rather colorful picture in the PC version.

 

The surrounding world, despite its linearity, is quite beautiful, and the detail of the game characters is simply amazing. Sometimes it even seems that in some ways the game is visually similar to The Witcher 2, although as we described earlier, in technological terms Of Orcs And Men is very far from perfect.

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 by the program MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average FPS was taken as a performance indicator. Below is a video of the test segment:  

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes of 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 with the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Of Orcs And Men. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA and AMD currently do not have proper support. The limiting factor for FPS is the fact that the game itself does not disable the vertical sync feature, so the frame limit is 60 FPS.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1680×1050 

 

At a resolution of 1680×1050 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 7770 or GEFORCE GTX 650 and above.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, an acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the level Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 460 and higher.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings, an acceptable minimum FPS was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 5830 level or GeForce GTX 460. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 5850 or GeForce GTX 560 Ti and higher.

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 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings 

 

The recommended amount of video memory for this game is 1024-1280 MB for different graphics quality settings and for different types of video cards.

CPU test

 

We tested processor dependence on 12 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of video cards for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920×1080 with maximum graphics quality settings.  

Testing at minimum quality settings 1920×1080

 

All tested processors handled Of Orcs And Men without much effort.

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 8GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

As we can see, with various basic quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Of Orcs And Men is at the same level of 600-700 megabytes. Thus, for a comfortable game you need to have at least 2 GB of RAM installed in your PC.