World in Conflict Results

The latest version of Massive's proprietary Masstech engine utilizes DX10 technology and features advanced lighting and physics effects, and allows for a full 360 degree range of camera control. Massive's MassTech engine scales down to accommodate a wide range of PC specifications, if you've played a modern PC game within the last two years, you'll be able to play World in Conflict.

World in Conflict's FPS-like control scheme and 360-degree camera make its action-strategy game play accessible to strategy fans and fans of other genres... if you love strategy, you'll love World in Conflict. If you've never played strategy, World in Conflict is the strategy game to try.

World in Conflict offers an in-game benchmark; which records the minimum, average, and maximum frame rates during the test. Very recently another hardware review website made the assertion that these tests are worthless, but we couldn't disagree more. When used to compare video cards which are dependant on the same driver and use the same GPU architecture, the in-game benchmark works very well and comparisons are apples-to-apples.

Based on the test results charted below it's clear that WiC doesn't place a limit on the maximum frame rate (to conserve wasted power) which is good for full-spectrum benchmarks like ours, but bad for electricity bills. The average frame rate is shown for each resolution in the chart below. At the lower 1280x1024 resolution most of our playing field is around 50-60 FPS. The GeForce 8800 GT, 9800 GTX+, and Radeon 4850 all share similar performance, while the Radeon HD 4870 and GTX 260 perform close as well.

At 1680x1050 the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 performs at 57 FPS while the GTX 260 holds at 59 FPS, while the others all float around the 45 FPS mark. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ finishes 1 FPS ahead of the Radeon HD 4850, leaving me with the feeling that overall they will each prevail by a small margin in their best tests.

With a balanced demand for CPU and GPU power, World in Conflict just begins to place demands on the graphics processor at the 1920x1280 resolution. I was expecting more results along the same line I've seen so far, and that is pretty much exactly what I got. The performance decay had very little impact on the high-level video cards: Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260, which for all intents an purposes performed extremely well up to this point in our WiC testing.

In our next section, we discuss electrical power consumption and learn how well (or poorly) each video card will impact your utility bill...

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