BattleForge - Renegade Benchmark Results

In anticipation of the Release of DirectX 11 with Windows 7 and coinciding with the release of AMD's ATI HD 5870, BattleForge has been updated to allow it to run using DirectX 11 on supported hardware. Well what does all of this actually mean you may ask? It gives us a sip of water from the Holy Grail of game designing and computing in general: greater efficiency! What does this mean for you? It means that that the game will demonstrate a higher level of performance for the same processing power, which in turn allows more to be done with the game graphically. In layman's terms the game will have a higher frame rate and new ways of creating graphical effects, such as shadows and lighting. The culmination of all of this is a game that both runs and looks better. The game is running on a completely new graphics engine that was built for BattleForge.

BattleForge is a next-gen real time strategy game, in which you fight epic battles against evil along with your friends. What makes BattleForge special is that you can assemble your army yourself: the units, buildings and spells in BattleForge are represented by collectible cards that you can trade with other players. BattleForge is developed by EA Phenomic. The studio was founded by Volker Wertich, father of the classic "The Settlers" and the SpellForce series. Phenomic has been an EA studio since August 2006.

BattleForge was released on Windows in March 2009. On May 26, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free branded game with only 32 of the 200 cards available. In order to get additional cards, players will now need to buy points on the BattleForge website. The retail version comes with all of the starter decks and 3,000 BattleForge points.

Never mind the DX10 v. DX11 question, the real news here is that this game was almost certainly developed exclusively on ATI hardware, and it shows. At both widescreen resolutions, the HD5770 trumps the GTX285, an almost unthinkable result. Each of the product families seems to scale appropriately, but the NVIDIA cards take a beating here. The benchmark itself is a tough one, once all the settings are maxed out.

EDITOR'S NOTE: SSAO Was enabled for these tests, which utilizes DirectX 11 code that older products may not be compatible with.

In our next section, we investigate the thermal performance of the Radeon HD5770, and see if that half-size 40nm GPU die runs as cool as we think it will.

<< Previous Page - Next Page >>