World in Conflict
I know a lot of people are waiting for StarCraft II to come out which is the sequel to one of the best real time strategy (RTS) games of all time. Since we don’t have StarCraft II here, we’ll use our old standby World in Conflict to assess potential performance in RTS titles. With the settings cranked to max, from what we can see from the results, everyone is in trouble when it comes to minimum frame rates with AA or AA off. However, average frame rates are good and keep the game fun for the most part in my hands on testing. GTX 460 seems to take less of a hit when enabling anti aliasing.
Battleforge
Battleforge is another great RTS benchmark that’s free to play and is put out by EA. It uses DX11 and looks really great and is fun to play when you get sick of Zergs, Protoss and Humans. The benchmark gives us an absolute worst case scenario with some crazy amounts of characters on the map. As you can see, it definitely stutters a bit with some very low minimum frame rates, but all three cards produce playable averages. Again, we see GTX 460 react well to the increase in quality a little anti-aliasing adds.
Street Fighter IV
This timeless classic gets played at LAN parties all the time. Based on DX9 we can see that this game plays well for all of the GPUs at the highest possible settings, both with AA and AA off. We do take a pretty major hit in performance for turning it on though. GTX 460 is clearly ahead by a long shot so this is one DX9 game where it is optimized well for this engine.
H.A.W.X.
H.A.W.X. doubles up as our flight simulator benchmark. It’s a really beautiful game that gives us access to eye candy from real aircraft models and real satellite maps. While playable on all three GPUs, the GTX 460 seems to reach in there and steal everyone’s lunch money. Percentage wise, turning on anti-aliasing has a negligible effect on frame rates and is completely playable on or off so you might as well leave it all on. This is also with settings cranked to high which is also impressive.
Final Fantasy XIV
Our last game benchmark is harder to decipher because we simply get a score at the end. However, the benchmark does have a chart at the bottom left hand corner that looks like a heartbeat, which I assume is the frame rate. Based on me sitting there for each card’s benchmark run, I could see visually just how well each card really did and how smooth the frame rate was. Despite this being a DirectX 11 benchmark, the GTX 460 was not smooth. The line created was rather herky jerky in some places where both the HD 5830 and HD 5770 were fine in. Since the game isn’t lated for release till September of this year, nVidia has lots of time to get some optimizations down to clean this performance up.