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3D Performance with Dark Messiah of Might and Magic September 26, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Have you finished Oblivion and you're now looking for a new first-person action RPG to pick up? If so, Dark Messiah may be the game for you. The game boasts stunning visuals including HDR lighting and is set to debut next month. In this article we take a look at 10 different high-end cards from ATI and NVIDIA. See who comes out on top inside!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 6 ) |
One such title that should give Oblivion some competition is Arkane Studios Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which continues the Might and Magic brand under Ubisoft’s direction. In the game you’ll play the role of Sareth, an apprentice sent by his master to help retrieve an ancient artifact. Over the course of the game your character will complete several missions. At the conclusion of each mission you’ll gain skill points which you can use to acquire new abilities, skills and spells. If you want to play as a mage, you can spend your skill points on magic and other attributes, or if you’d like to play as a warrior, you can spend them on warrior skills.
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Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is played from the first-person perspective and uses Valve’s Source game engine, which was used successfully by Valve in Half-Life 2 and Ritual for Sin Episodes.
Arkane Studios has integrated all of the goodies from Source into Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, including high resolution displacement maps/textures and HDR lighting. In fact, Dark Messiah uses higher resolution textures than those used in the original Half-Life 2.
Judging by the texture quality present in the demo and publicly available screenshots you can make an argument that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is the best-looking Source engine title that’s been released to date. And since Valve’s Source engine uses your DX9 card’s pixel shaders rather than FP16 to handle HDR lighting, you can game with HDR+AA regardless of the graphics card you own.
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This means that even those of you with older Radeon 9800 cards can play Dark Messiah with HDR, or GeForce 7 card owners can turn on HDR with AA. In our preliminary testing with Dark Messiah, turning on HDR brought dropped performance by about 20-25% depending on screen resolution though, so you may want to play with the HDR setting on/off and compare the difference if you’re using an older/slower graphics card.
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For today’s article we wanted to take a look at how well Dark Messiah of Might and Magic played with today’s latest high-end graphics cards. In order to do this, we’re testing with FRAPS, as demo recording/playback seems to be broken in the current Dark Messiah demo. Our gameplay testing comes from the opening level of the demo, and in order to make the testing sequence as repeatable as possible, doesn’t include combat. We’re testing in a pretty stressful area of the map to compensate (in part) for this.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 2 / 6 ) |
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (975X)
ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3
BFG GeForce 7950 GX2
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
ForceWare 91.47
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
Catalyst 6.8
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB
Catalyst 6.9
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
DirectX 9.0c
Western Digital Raptor 74GB
Benchmarks
Dark Messiah Demo
Notes
As always, we’re running the GeForce cards in “high quality” image mode, rather than the driver control panel’s default of “quality” mode. We’re running in high quality mode to cut down on the amount of texture shimmering seen under the default quality mode. Note that this does negatively impact performance slightly. We’re testing the X1950 XTX with a custom version of Catalyst 6.8 that properly supports the X1950 XTX GPU, as Catalyst 6.9 doesn’t support the card. ATI won’t offer official support for the X1950 XTX until Catalyst 6.10 is released next month.
| 256MB vs 512MB Performance | Page:: ( 3 / 6 ) |
Dark Messiah – Direct3D
| Dark Messiah Performance 1280x1024 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GT 512MB | 37 | 63 |
| GeForce 7900 GT 256MB | 35 | 62 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 56 | 81 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 256MB | 50 | 82 |
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Notes
To test the impact 512MB of memory has on GeForce cards, we’re underclocking a 512MB 7900 GTX to 7900 GT speeds and comparing the difference in performance. Looking over the results, the 7900 GT benefits little from the extra memory until we hit 1600x1200, where performance jumps by an astounding 31%. In contrast, the Radeon X1900 XT benefits from the extra memory at all resolutions, with the improvement ranging from 4-6% depending on the screen resolution.
| Dark Messiah Performance | Page:: ( 4 / 6 ) |
Dark Messiah – Direct3D
| Dark Messiah Performance 1280x1024 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 50 | 83 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 35 | 62 |
| GeForce 7950 GT | 41 | 66 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 10 | 28 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 60 | 85 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 56 | 81 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 62 | 90 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 48 | 68 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX | 34 | 54 |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 74 | 116 |
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| SLI vs CrossFire Performance | Page:: ( 5 / 6 ) |
Dark Messiah – Direct3D
| Dark Messiah Performance 1280x1024 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 99 | 158 |
| GeForce 7950 GT SLI | 85 | 139 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 64 | 113 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 101 | 152 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire | 114 | 158 |
| Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire | 82 | 120 |
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Notes
We should note that the Dark Messiah demo supported SLI (including the GeForce 7950 GX2) out-of-the-box, with no adjustments necessary to the driver’s control panel. This bodes well for seamless SLI support when the game is finally released. We had to force CrossFire mode by adjusting the Catalyst AI slider from “standard” to “advanced”, which forces AFR mode on Dark Messiah.
| Final thoughts | Page:: ( 6 / 6 ) |
At about $500+ online though, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is priced out of the range of many, at the $400-$499 price point clearly the Radeon X1950 XTX delivers the best performance, outperforming the GeForce 7900 GTX by 15% or more in our testing. In fact, ATI’s cheaper Radeon X1900 XTX and X1900 XT 512MB also outperformed the 7900 GTX in our tests with Dark Messiah, it clearly looks like this game favors ATI cards at this point.
In terms of multi-GPU performance, the NVIDIA cards scale well with Dark Messiah, allowing the GeForce 7900 GTX to outperform the X1950 XTX CrossFire setup at 1024x768x32, and draw within 10% of the CrossFire setup at 1600x1200. We also noted that the X1950 XTX pulls away from the X1900 XTX when both cards are running in CrossFire mode. The margin separating both cards goes from 3-4% in single config to 8-11% when running a CrossFire setup.
Dark Messiah favors 512MB graphics cards, although we saw little or no performance improvement on the 7900 GT until we cranked the screen resolution up to 1600x1200. (Also note that we ran the game with all quality settings set to “high”.) At that resolution the 512MB board ran up to 31% faster than the 256MB card. The Radeon X1900 XT 512MB card ran 4-6% faster than the 256MB card overall. Considering that Radeon X1900 XT 256MB cards can be found for as little as $240, you may want to opt for the 256MB X1900 XT card if you’re on a budget. It will deliver more performance in Dark Messiah and do so at a lower price than the GeForce 7950 GT.
So that’s our take on the best picks for Dark Messiah among high-end graphics cards as it stands now. The GX2 is our top choice if you’ve got an infinite budget, while the X1900 XT 256MB would be the best solution for those of you who want to spend less than $300. In between ATI’s cards dominate as well, with the X1950 XTX at the top and the X1900 XT 512MB and X1900 XTX in the middle. Performance can change once the final game ships sometime next month though, so we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if it does.