Age Of Empires III

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

We have used the full retail version of Age Of Empires III, patched to version 1.01. The game has a wide install base, supporting everything from the latest Shader Model 3.0 video cards, such as Radeon X1800XT and GeForce 7800 GTX, right back to fixed-function video cards that supported DirectX 7.0, like the GeForce 2.

Ensemble Studios have concentrated on making the game look as good as possible - we'd argue that this is currently the best looking game on the market. The attention to detail is simply outstanding. We've attached a couple of screenshots to show just how good this game looks.

The developers have also implemented high-dynamic range lighting, but it appears to look more like a bloom effect. HDR allows scenes to look much more natural because the lights can be brighter and the shadows can be darker, while maintaining a high level of detail, too. Turning the "Bloom" HDR option on really makes the world look impressively dreamy and realistic.

We did a manual run through from the tutorial, followed by a skirmish in order to evaluate the real game performance at certain resolution and detail settings. We found that there was a massive performance hit from enabling Anti-Aliasing, so we have left it disabled in this case. An average of 30 fps and a minimum of 10 fps seemed to be reasonably playable through the skirmishes, which are generally pretty intensive.

We fired up Age Of Empires III with the Radeon X1800XT installed and set the resolution to 1600x1200 with no AA, High AF and maximum details, including Very High Shaders & Shadows, HDR Bloom, Water Reflections and High Texture detail. We then fired up the tutorial mission. By the time we had completed the first 30 seconds of the tutorial, we found that the frame rate was not going to improve.

The game was not playable at these settings at all, with an average of 23 frames per second through the entire tutorial - we didn't attempt to play a skirmish at these settings. However, we faired a little better at 1280x1024 with the same detail settings - we were able to achieve a playable frame rate of 31 frames per second with the frame rate never dipping below 10 fps during the intense parts of the skirmish game we played.

In contrast, both of the GeForce 7800 GTX's were playable at 1600x1200 0xAA High AF with the same detail settings as the Radeon X1800XT. The XFX GeForce 7800 GTX Extreme Gamer Edition was noticeably smoother than the reference card because of the higher average frame rate. We found that enabling the 'High Quality' driver setting removed some shimmering that we were seeing on the ground, when scrolling around the world - we'd recommend using the high quality driver setting if you've got an NVIDIA GeForce 6 or 7-series video card and are playing this game.

We tried to enable Anti-Aliasing on the XFX 7800 GTX Extreme Gamer, but found that we had to lower the resolution to 1280x1024 in order to get a frame rate above 30 frames per second. We know that the game was designed to work well on NVIDIA's hardware, but we didn't expect it to perform so badly on ATI's Radeon X1800XT in comparison. If you're one of the many people that have bought this game and want to play it the way that the developer intended, we'd recommend looking towards a GeForce 7-series video card.