War Thunder: World of Planes Beta – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2012
Genre: MMO
developer: Gaijin Entertainment
Publishing house: Gaijin Entertainment

 

War thunder: World of planes is a military MMO game dedicated to combat aviation, armored vehicles and navy of the Second World War. The project is being developed and published by Gaijin Entertainment, known primarily for its gaming flight simulators for PCs and consoles. The project is currently in closed beta testing.

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

War Thunder World of Planes is supported by major Windows operating systems, which include  Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The game also plans to support Mac OS.

 

The priority and main graphics API for the PC version is DirectX 9.

Game engine

The game engine for War Thunder World of Planes is Dagor Engine. Dagor Engine is a game engine developed by the Russian company Gaijin Entertainment both for use in its projects and for licensing to third-party companies. Dagor has been developed since 2001 and is constantly being improved. PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are supported. At the end of 2010, the latest version of the engine is the third one. “Dagor” is used in the vast majority of Gaijin Entertainment’s games.

Gaijin Entertainment was founded in 2001. At the same time, the first version of “Dagor” began to be developed. The team working on the engine was separated into a separate division. On June 14, 2005, Gaijin Entertainment announced the acquisition of a license for the Meqon Game Dynamics physics engine developed by the Swedish company Meqon Research AB and integrating it into the second version of Dagor. Some time after the company’s founding, but before early 2006, the Dagor development division was spun off into a completely separate company, Dagor Technologies, which continued to work exclusively on the engine. On March 29, 2006, the third version of the Dagor engine was officially announced. This version had support for the main sixth and seventh generation consoles.

On April 7, 2006, an official press release from Ageia and Gaijin Entertainment published during KRI 2006 announced the acquisition of the latest license for the Ageia PhysX physics engine developed by Ageia. It was stated that Ageia PhysX will be integrated into Dagor. On April 20, 2008, at the KRI Awards ceremony, which took place in Moscow as part of the annual Game Developers Conference, Gaijin Entertainment received awards in two categories, including the “Best Technology” category for the Dagor Engine.

The graphics engine included in the Dagor Engine supports many graphic effects and technologies. It is based on Direct3D 9 and supports shader programs versions 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, 2.0, 2.0x. There is both a proprietary shader programming language and the ability to use HLSL. The graphics engine supports many lighting algorithms and light sources. High Dynamic Range Rendering is widely used in both static and dynamic lighting. There are scattered and directed light sources and luminous objects. There are per-vertex and per-pixel lighting, lightmaps, Global Illumination algorithms, dynamic shadows based on projective shadow maps, soft shadows, volumetric rays. Contains a set of various graphic post-effects: Bloom, color post-processing, Glow, Motion blur, Flares and Lens Flares, as well as many others.

There is rich support for rendering water surfaces, which includes various types of water with support for HDR, ripples, reflections, and Fresnel refraction. Decals, volumetric fog and smoke, reflective and refractive surfaces, glass, chrome, lacquered surfaces, leather, various vegetation are present and supported, and there is support for SpeedTree technology. The particle system allows you to simulate sparks, smoke, fire, precipitation, leaves, insects and auras.

“Dagor Engine” contains its own built-in physics engine. This engine contains collision detection modules, a rigid body physics processor, Ragdoll physics, and vehicle physics. There is also a set of geometric primitives and various joints, and dynamic destruction of joints is supported. Fluid physics and particle physics are also present.

Despite having its own physics engine, Dagor Engine contains an open interface that allows you to connect third-party physics engines. The following third-party physics engines have been reported to be successful: Ageia PhysX, Meqon, and Newton Game Dynamics.

Advanced Game Settings

War Thunder World of Planes has both basic and advanced graphics settings. There are four quality levels available for all types of settings: cinema, high, medium and low. You can also flexibly manipulate individual settings. Graphic settings can be changed directly through the game launcher.

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game War Thunder World of Planes at various graphic settings, where our readers can see the difference between minimum, medium, high and cinematic graphics quality settings. 

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

High quality settings

Very high settings

 With different settings, the game shows the appropriate level of quality. At maximum graphics settings, War Thunder World of Planes looks most attractive.

General visual design and game physics

War Thunder World of Planes left a very pleasant impression – at the moment it is one of the most beautiful and technologically advanced games in the entire universe of “technical” MMOs. In terms of its technological parameters and visual component, the game is head and shoulders ahead of its brother World of Tanks.

 

Air battles are staged very attractively, and the varied and rich game locations add flavor to the game. The controls are implemented very competently, and we can enjoy the game on any gaming controller without any problems. In our case, it was convenient to play both on a standard keyboard/mouse and on a gamepad from XboX 360.

 

Well, then 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 FPS was taken as a performance indicator.

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes of 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by War Thunder World of Planes. The test was carried out in ultra-high quality graphics modes. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA are not supported, and AMD generally manages to go into the red. We were also disappointed when using the new AMD 7XXX series video cards with Graphics Core Next technology – like multi-chip configurations, they had serious performance problems. The test was carried out in the in-game benchmark “Eastern Front”. 

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1680×1050

 

At a resolution of 1680×1050 at maximum settings, an acceptable minimum FPS was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 5750 or GeForce level GTS 450. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 6790 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti and above.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 5750 or GeForce GTS 450 level again showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon HD 6790 or GeForce GTX 460SE and above.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 5850 or GeForce GTX 460 level showed an acceptable minimum FPS. The optimal video cards would be Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce GTX 480 and higher. As we wrote above, video cards with AMD architecture Graphics Core Next has performance problems – this is most likely a problem either with game optimization, unfinished drivers, or our test system.

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 optimal amount of video memory for this game is 700-1000 MB. 

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 1024×768 with minimal graphics quality settings.  

Testing at minimum quality settings 1024×768

 

 All of our CPU test models provided optimal performance. With this optimization parameter, War Thunder World of Planes is doing great.

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 video memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in War Thunder World of Planes is at the level of 500-600 megabytes. 

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