Auto Assault

Author: bit-tech Staff
Published: 2nd June 2006
Comments (10) Stumble
Online only games are notoriously difficult to benchmark, and Auto Assault is no different. In Auto Assault your FPS is closely linked to the server’s performance – which may explain the atrocious FPS we have seen in town areas of the games. However in the outlying areas there are often very few other players. When you find one of these areas, you need to add some action.

We chose a site on Highway 80, where there are some large mobs of vehicles to simulate normal gameplay. We blasted tanks, jeeps and troops for four minutes and recorded the framerate using FRAPS. Benchmark runs were repeated several times and averaged to determine the minimum and overall average framerate across the game.

For our high-end cards, we forced a higher level of AA and AF in the driver, since the game only sets 2x AA.

High-End System Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz, 13x200MHz), ABIT AN8 32X (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS4000 Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-3-3-7-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty soundcard; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 platform drivers, version 6.82.

Video Cards:
  • BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 670/1640MHz using Forceware 84.25, available from nZone;
  • Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 650/1550MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;
  • BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 425/1050MHz using Forceware 84.25, available from nZone.
  • Sapphire Radeon X1800XL 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 500/1000MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;


Auto Assault High Quality
Auto Assault High Quality

We had no difficulty running the game at Full Detail settings on a high-end system, but because Auto Assault’s FPS is dependant on the server, we found a massive difference in performance between towns and outlying areas. Settings that provide smooth play when driving in the plains, can still cause you problems in the towns – we saw as little as 8FPS in some places.

If you choose to live with the FPS problems, then you can crank all your settings up on these high-end systems. They also allowed us to set 4x AA and 8x AF through the driver on all these cards, although the Radeon X1800XL and GeForce 7800GT are borderline, and you may choose to decrease the level of AA to increase the average FPS.

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