Will This Run On My Card Pt 1?

Right, okay, where to start? Graphically, World in Conflict is a thoroughly complex game with huge battlefields and massively complex and beautiful battles – so beautiful that at one point I came close to falling off my chair coughing in response to on-screen smoke. Then I remembered that I actually have a sore throat at the moment (note to self: stay away from the cheap scrumpy next holiday) and I decided not to bother.

World in Conflict is so complex in fact that it has multiple pages of graphical options and includes support for both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 on both single and multiple displays. Not all of these options are massively important and things like shadow toggles don’t really need an in-depth explanation.

So, to make it easier we’re going to look at the graphical presets and then a selection of the most important individual graphical options. To help make things simple, all the screenshots below are (unless stated otherwise) taken under DirectX 10 – as this is what the game was designed for after all. Also, unless we say otherwise, there’s going to be noticeable difference between the DX9 and DX10 images for our settings.

Graphical Presets

World in Conflict comes with a few handy graphical gizmos – graphical presets and a automatic benchmark being least of them all. There are six settings to choose from for the presets; Very High, High, Medium, Low, Very Low. Whilst the two highest settings both function under DirectX 10, switching to a lower setting will scale down automatically to DirectX 9.


We took all the above screenshots on the same hardware – our standard gaming rig which houses 2GB RAM, runs on Vista and has an Nvidia 8800 GTS. We also took all the pictures from within the games default benchmark, so if you have enlarge them then you’ll be able to see a figure on the left hand side which tells you the framerate we were getting at that point.

The obvious benefit of performance is a bit deceptive here though – in the High preset screenshot we only see 10FPS, yet in-game we never saw anything this low so take those figures with a pinch of salt. Obviously though the lower presets just don’t look as good. The smoke clips the ground nastily, the AA is in the basement and the textures are a lot more dull. Basically, you want to push the slider up as high as possible.

Texture Quality

Let’s look at the Texture Quality setting next then. There are actually two texture quality settings to choose from; the bog-standard Texture Quality and the Terrain Texture Quality setting. Each one of them has High, Medium and Low options.

However, after taking comparative screenshots of both settings, we came to the conclusion that the Terrain Texture Quality setting had a minimal effect on how the game looked. In fact, at first we couldn’t notice any difference between the options for this setting. A bit of careful detective work helped us to figure out this setting mainly effects the quality of distant terrain textures only, but it still didn’t have a massive effect.


Spot the difference between the High and Medium settings? It’s subtle, but it is there if you look really close. The difference between Medium and Low however is much more pronounced, with a general blurriness overcoming the entire screen as if the developers had coded the level whilst drunk. The lesson here? Push to medium if at all possible, or High if you want just a fraction more clarity.