Developed from the ground-up by Riot Games, LoL uses a proprietary game engine intended to facilitate maximum compatibility with a wide range of PC hardware. Instead of getting majorly overhauled, the engine receives small patches to continually improve it. While we've watched visual quality get better since the original release back in 2010, though, it'd be hard to pinpoint the exact changes without side-by-side screenshots. The art style is very similar to the game's spiritual roots in World Of Warcraft III: Reign Of Chaos. The Blizzard influence is obvious, although LoL has more of a cartoonish edge to its models and characters.

Detail settings are controlled by four switches: Character Quality, Effects Quality, Environment Quality, and Shadows. Each of these have five levels of detail: Very Low, Low, Medium, High, and Very High. Since the game tends to be so easy on hardware, we're keeping everything maxed out for our benchmarks except for the Shadows setting, which has the most dramatic effect on frame rates.

For comparison, we captured the difference between each setting below:

Frankly, the difference between the High and Very High Shadows settings are very subtle. Low sticks you with blocky shadows, though they only seem to affect characters, and not the environment. Those bottom-end settings are here for your information only; we didn't find them necessary to use since our most entry-level components were able to handle quite a bit more.
- The Legendary League Of Legends
- Image Quality And Settings
- Test System And Graphics Hardware
- League Of Legends: Low Details, 1920x1080
- League Of Legends: High Details, 1680x1050
- League Of Legends: High Details, 1920x1080
- League Of Legends: High Details, 5760x1080
- League Of Legends: CPU Benchmarks
- League Of Legends Is A Remarkably Lightweight Game
LoL may not be the prettiest game out there, but it is a lot of fun.
Also, no love for Heroes of Newerth?
LoL may not be the prettiest game out there, but it is a lot of fun.
This is one of those games when the smallest stutter can grind your bones to dust.
So you REALLY want a near-constant 60FPS for this one.
Anypony disagree???
U got the chart wrong? is the 210 and 6450 swiched ?
[EDITOR: Yes, we got it mixed up. Thanks for the note, fixed! - Don]
It would have been more interesting to see it tested on the oldest possible computers.
I suppose this time CPU latency numbers don't matter that much since it's such a light load. But I still want to take this opportunity to ask for them in the future articles when there is a heavier load and differences between FPS scores.
By the way, interesting how the iGPUs perform against faster Radeon cards in latency measurements. Would you add the desktop chips for the next review alongside the mobile?
Shame on all of you for supporting the pay to win model. You are going to ruin gaming, and your bank accounts.