World in Conflict

Publisher: Sierra

We regard World in Conflict as one of the best real-time strategy games we've ever played. It's based on Microsoft's DirectX 10 API and, in collaboration with Nvidia's The Way It's Meant To Be Played developer support team, it incorporates some DirectX 10 specific graphics effects.

For our testing purposes, we used a full retail copy of the game and patched it to version 1.007, which includes a few fixes and some improved performance under DirectX 10.

The built-in benchmark is incredibly CPU limited, throwing masses of smoke and particle effects into the scene, making this great for testing CPU performance. In-game performance isn't quite as CPU limited as the benchmark, but it still is to some extent meaning that a good CPU is important for optimal performance in this game.



AMD's new Phenom X3 8750 again falls behind Intel's higher-clocked but equivalently priced dual-core processors in our second game test, World in Conflict, but with medium detail enabled, the frame rates are too high for this to matter. However, when the 'high' preset is enabled (with AA and AF disabled in the advanced tab), the performance difference is around six frames per second or 10-15 percent, which is quite a big margin in a game that is notoriously CPU-limited.