Recommended Settings

The following recommendations are based on trying to maintain the best possible picture quality and framerate during gameplay. The CPU on the benchmarking rig used is definitely the bottleneck, so we won’t see many averages higher than the 50s. On our value card, we are shooting for best possible quality with at least 35FPS. Mainstream cards are trying to get as much quality as possible also, but at higher resolutions. With the high-end we are definitely running with the highest quality graphics options and then enabling Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering to the equation to see hits associated with them.

Starting with...

Higher-end Cards: ATI Radeon 9800XT, GeForce 6600GT

-GeForce 6600GT:
This card produced decent numbers across the board except when running 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 8xAF in Max Texture quality mode. I could not get the card to give me more than 5FPS. I am pretty intent on calling this a software glitch of some sort. On the configuration used, I would recommend 1280x1024, setting all in game options to High except for Texture Detail (set to Medium), Shadows set to Low, and enable only 8xAF. This should give you great quality and sufficient framerate. If your system is inferior to mine, then try the settings above at 1024x768 and max out Texture Detail and Shadows and exclude 8xAF.

-Radeon 9800XT:
The 9800XT consistently provided good framerates and great quality even at higher resolutions. You can pretty much run this card with all of the settings listed above set to maximum at 1280x1024 and turn on 4xAA and 8xAF and enjoy very smooth gameplay without any choppy frames. 6xAA and 16xAF were glitchy and artifacts were showing up on screen in busy areas of the game at 1280x1024.


Mainstream Cards: Tyan Tachyon G9500 Pro, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (GDDR3)

- RADEON 9500 Pro:
I’m still amazed at how well this card performs with its inception over two years ago. It consistently hit near 50’s in regards to FPS on all tests run at 1024x768. This is nice to know considering most budget gamers are running at this resolution and trying to balance quality and performance. At 1024x768, set everything to High Quality mode and enjoy the gameplay. If it runs sort of shoddy on your configuration, try lowering settings for Texture Detail and Shadow Detail. At 1280x1024 I recommend Model Detail set to High, Textures Detail set to High, Simple Reflections for Water Detail, Shadow and Shader Detail set to low.

-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (GDDR3):
The FX 5700 Ultra reference board did a good job of maintaining around 40 frames per second in most of the tests run for this guide. Since this card is native to Direct X 8.1, some of the results will be closer to cards superior to it due to the aforementioned limitation. At 800x600, set everything to max and it runs fine. I would say this is a solid performer at High Quality in Model Detail, Texture Detail set to High, Simple Reflections, Shadow and Shader set to Low at 1024x768. I really don’t recommend this at 1280x1024 since you will lose much visual quality in textures and models, which are a big part of the game.


Value Card: ASUS V9280 Ti4200 8X

-GeForce4 Ti4200 8X:
As with the FX 5700 Ultra, you can go ahead and set everything to High Quality and run pretty smooth at 800x600. At 1024x768, set Texture Detail to High, Model Detail to Medium, Simple Reflections, Shadow Detail to High, and Shader Detail to Low. The reason I recommend this is because textures have a big part in the appearance of the game, and keeping Textures and Shadow Detail set to High Quality make the world look more realistic, and that’s what we are shooting for.

*Remember some of these game settings are very CPU dependent, so a faster machine than the ones used in these tests will provide better results.