City of Villains
Moving onto the graphics, there are some funky new features inside City of Villains. Textures are higher resolution and polygon counts are also up fairly significantly from CoH. Blooming is included, which isn't quite HDR, but is a step in the right direction. Texture quality has been increased at the top end, and there's a wide variety of settings you can play with to get the optimal visual experience out of your card.
There are also some cool new physics features. Rag-dolling vastly breaks the characters out of the 'scripted animation' reactions to things and when your Power Thrust hurls an unsuspecting peon against a wall, you really get a sense of them crunching against the brickwork instead of falling predictably to their knees.
Finally, the game is one of the first to support dual core processors. The game will actually run faster, clock for clock, if you have a dual core chip such as a Pentium D or Athlon X2.
Low textures and Medium textures
High textures and Very High textures
Here you can see different levels of texture quality. If you want to run the absolute top-notch setting, you better be prepared with a fast 256MB card. Due to the scalability of the engine, you can actually run low-textures on some pretty old cards and get playable frame rates. However, for those of you with 7800GTs or GTXs, you'll be pleased to know that the graphical detail is there for you to maximise.
0xAA and 2xAA
4xAA
Throughout CoV, you spend a lot of time outdoors in cities. Cities have big buildings and lots of incidental scenery including power and phone lines. Because of the amount of time you spend looking at straight lines, you will find AA something of a necessity for the game, if you can manage it. For instance, we'd take 1280x1024 with 4xAA over straight 1600x1200 every day. The performance penalty for AA is as you'd expect.
There are also some cool new physics features. Rag-dolling vastly breaks the characters out of the 'scripted animation' reactions to things and when your Power Thrust hurls an unsuspecting peon against a wall, you really get a sense of them crunching against the brickwork instead of falling predictably to their knees.
Finally, the game is one of the first to support dual core processors. The game will actually run faster, clock for clock, if you have a dual core chip such as a Pentium D or Athlon X2.
Texture Quality
Low textures and Medium textures
High textures and Very High textures
Here you can see different levels of texture quality. If you want to run the absolute top-notch setting, you better be prepared with a fast 256MB card. Due to the scalability of the engine, you can actually run low-textures on some pretty old cards and get playable frame rates. However, for those of you with 7800GTs or GTXs, you'll be pleased to know that the graphical detail is there for you to maximise.
The need for AA
0xAA and 2xAA
4xAA
Throughout CoV, you spend a lot of time outdoors in cities. Cities have big buildings and lots of incidental scenery including power and phone lines. Because of the amount of time you spend looking at straight lines, you will find AA something of a necessity for the game, if you can manage it. For instance, we'd take 1280x1024 with 4xAA over straight 1600x1200 every day. The performance penalty for AA is as you'd expect.
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