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Imperium Romanum
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 27th February 2008
Graphics
The graphics in Imperium Romanum aren't ever going to wow you or make you fall off your seat in awe like some sort of clumsy idiot, but they can still look pretty good nonetheless.To help you get the most out of the game, we've got a quick breakdown of the graphical presets and view distance options – these are the ones that will give you the best idea of how the game might look on your PC and, to be honest, there aren't a lot of settings to fiddle with in the game anyway.
We ran the game on a fairly modest little system—2GB of RAM, Vista and a GeForce 7900 GTX—and didn't run into any performance problems at all. The game was smooth as you'd wish, barring a few momentary pauses for autosaves every 15 minutes.
Presets
These pictures below (click to enlarge) show what the game's four different graphical presets look like and give a rough idea of the total scalability of the game. Check them out.
Presets: Ultra (far left), High (left), Medium (right) and low (far right).
To me, the really interesting thing here is that although a few graphical things definitely change—anti-aliasing and shadows for instance—the textures remain pretty much the same. We actually tried to have a look at the texture settings on its own at one point, but couldn't spot a difference on the different screenshots.
Imperium Romanum is pretty darn scalable too, as you can tell by the graphics. Apart from the drop in AA and shadows the game still looks very good overall – and the loss of AA and shadows isn't all that bad really.
View Distance
Your View Distance is a setting that is going to be affected by playing style as well as PC hardware. If you prefer to spend a lot of time zoomed in on your game and looking closely at your citizens then view distance won't have a massive effect – the same is true if you have a very steep viewing angle. On the other hand, a shallow angle and zoomed out perspective means that the effect will be more noticeable.
View distance: High (left), Medium (center) and Low (right)
To us, both on High and Medium the viewable distance is perfectly acceptable. On Low, it's obviously less so. It's worth pointing out though that you're never really missing much in terms of detail, just extra horizon.
That said, the amount of pop-up in Imperium Romanum is pretty ludicrous and in vistas like those above moving about can create quite a jarring amount of it. Still, as this isn't an especially taxing game then we'd imagine almost everyone can afford to boost this setting up to the maximum.
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