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.

The first of these is a soft particle effect that removes the banding often found in particle effects like smoke, explosions, fire and debris - the effects simply didn't exist in the 3D world; instead, they were merely an add-on. With DirectX 10, the edges of the particle effects are much softer and banding is almost non-existent as the effects now interact with their 3D surroundings, as they're actually a part of the 3D world.

Additionally there are global cloud shadowing and volumetric lighting effects in the DirectX 10 version of the game. The latter is often referred to as 'god rays' and its implementation in World in Conflict interacts with the surroundings incredibly well. On the other hand, the former is where clouds cast shadows on the rest of the environment and, because all clouds in World in Conflict are volumetric and dynamic, the shadows cast by the clouds are rendered dynamically in DirectX 10 - they adjust in relation to the size, shape and orientation of the cloud in relation to the light source.

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. We used a manual run through from the Invasion level, which incorporates all of the effects we've discussed above. We chose not to use the built-in benchmark because it's largely CPU-limited. We used the "very high" preset, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

There are some respectable performance increases in World in Conflict, especially with regard to the minimum frame rate. When anti-aliasing is disabled, the gameplay smoothness is notably better, but when it's enabled, the differences aren't quite so profound.

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2

Disappointingly, the GeForce 9800 GX2 loses some ground in WiC, but gameplay smoothness isn't really affected until you get right up to 2560x1600 0xAA 16xAF, where the average frame rate drops by around eight percent. What's more, the minimum frame rate drops from 21 to 17, which does have more of an impact than you would think - moving around, especially panning, is quite a bit choppier than it was with just the hotfixes installed.