Image Quality, Settings And Test Setup
Techland uses the new Chrome Engine 6 as Dying Light's heart, body and mind. It incorporates a number of improvements over Chrome Engine 5, including new weather conditions, spherical harmonics-based indirect lighting and atmospheric scattering. The game looks and feels like a good survival-horror title should, putting a nice twist on an already saturated market. It's actually the first title to utilize Chrome Engine 6, and Dying Light is a great showcase for what the technology can do.
The landscape consists of two different maps: slums and an economically privileged area with much larger buildings. It is a pretty, yet dark game, and TechLand does a good job with both environments. They remain both scary and beautiful, day and night.
Our custom benchmark took a while to concoct. We settled on a spot that requires a fair bit of running from the home base, since there is no fast travel option. It begins in front of an abandoned school and continues to a bridge with a car that is on fire. This creates a dip in performance and shows the game's beautiful fire effects.
We decided to test the Low, Medium and Very High detail presets. We excluded the High setting, since it appears similar to Very High. Note that we disabled Nvidia's GeForce-specific settings to keep the rendering load equal.
Test System And Hardware
As always, we strive to represent results across a wide range of graphics hardware, testing every modern card we could get our hands on, from the Radeon HD 6450 to the GeForce GTX 980 and dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2. We tried testing GeForce GTX 970 and 980 cards in SLI, but our samples aren't identical and SLI doesn't seem to work with boards from different manufacturers.
Our benchmarks include a number of resolutions, from 1280x720 to 3840x2160. The 4K resolution is equivalent to four 1080p monitors. But despite the massive number of pixels, Ultra HD screens are becoming more popular every day thanks to sub-$600 options like Asus' PB298Q.
This 28" display is capable of driving a 3840x2160 signal at 60Hz over a single DisplayPort 1.2 cable. You can read more about the screen in Asus PB287Q 28-Inch 4K Monitor Review: Ultra HD For $650
Test System | |
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CPU | Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), 3.3 GHz, Six Cores, LGA 2011, 15MB Shared L3 Cache, Hyper-Threading enabled. |
Motherboard | ASRock X79 Extreme9 (LGA 2011) Chipset: Intel X79 Express |
Networking | On-Board Gigabit LAN controller |
Memory | Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T |
Graphics | GeForce GT 730 512MB GDDR5GeForce GTX 650 2GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 660 2GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 760 2GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 970 4GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 980 4GB GDDR5Radeon HD 6450 512MB GDDR5Radeon R7 240 1GB DDR3Radeon R7 250X 1GB GDDR5Radeon R7 260X 1GB GDDR5Radeon R9 270 2GB GDDR5Radeon R9 285 3GB GDDR5Radeon R9 290X 4GB GDDR5Radeon R9 295X2 8GB GDDR5 |
SSD | Samsung 840 Pro, 256 GB SSD, SATA 6Gb/s |
Power | XFX PRO850W, ATX12V, EPS12V |
Software and Drivers | |
Operating System | Microsoft Windows 8 Pro x64 |
DirectX | DirectX 11 |
Graphics Drivers | AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega, Nvidia GeForce 347.25 WHQL |
Benchmarks | |
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Dying Light | In-game Benchmark, Fraps run, 40 seconds |