League Of Legends Performance, Benchmarked

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Following up our Dota 2 performance analysis, we benchmark the most-played PC game in the world, League Of Legends, and find out just how much graphics and CPU performance it requires for high-resolution, high-detail play, even across three screens.

League Of Legends: High Details, 1680x1050

The rest of our tests are recorded with every detail setting maxed out, including shadows. Does this affect the cards we've already tested, even at 1680x1050?

All of these discrete GPUs maintain more than 30 FPS.

Charting frame rates over time shows that playing at more than 30 FPS is only a worry for the Radeon HD 6450.

Although our subjective analysis doesn't raise any red flags, AMD's Radeon 6670 DDR3 does exceed 15 ms when we filter out the 95th percentile. The Radeon HD 6450's variance is much more than that. This is particularly problematic in light of the fact that we've seen side-by-side comparisons demonstrating as little as 5 ms variance causing significant issues with smoothness. Naturally, then, we wouldn't recommend running the 6450 at LoL's top detail settings. 

Don Woligroski
72 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Zero_
    Looks like everyone is jobless these days...

    Also, no love for Heroes of Newerth?
    Reply
  • Martell1977
    No surprises here, LoL is a very resource light game. I can run it on all medium settings on my old Pentium 4 3.2ghz with a AGP Radeon 3850 @ 1440x900 resolution with more than playable frame rates. The only issue is initial stutter at at the very start of a match that and long loading times. (however, I only use that machine when I have 3 or more players at my house)

    LoL may not be the prettiest game out there, but it is a lot of fun.
    Reply
  • amuffin
    Ezreal 2 good.
    Reply
  • Novuake
    Interesting side note : When I was trying this on my HD4000 instead of my HD7950, when the drops under 50FPS become a HUGE hindrance in teamfights, to the point of extreme frustration.

    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???
    Reply
  • JJ1217
    Yeah.. no one cares. Everyone knows you can basically run it on any rig.
    Reply
  • griptwister
    I ran it on Ultra settings at 1080P with a Phenom II x4 840 and a GTS 450 512mb with a stable 60FPS. lol, it's not that hard to run at all.
    Reply
  • aggroboy
    When working in out-of-town projects, the few games my ultralight can play are indies, emulators and LoL.
    Reply
  • rdc85
    "...though the GeForce 210 does exceed 15 ms in our subsequent frame latency variance chart..."

    U got the chart wrong? is the 210 and 6450 swiched ?

    Reply
  • anxiousinfusion
    JJ1217Yeah.. no one cares. Everyone knows you can basically run it on any rig.
    It would have been more interesting to see it tested on the oldest possible computers.
    Reply
  • jdwii
    Why wait this long to review this game? At least half the people at my college play this game,
    Reply