A Free-To-Play MMO? Neverwinter Performance, Benchmarked

Features
By published

Neverwinter is a new free-to-play MMO in the Dungeons And Dragons universe, sporting an action RPG flavor. We benchmark it with a number of graphics cards and CPUs, uncovering a processor-oriented bottleneck along the way. Does your platform measure up?

Results: Medium Quality, 1920x1080

These benchmarks are generated on a Core i5-3550-based platform, allowing us to focus on the performance that different graphics cards produce. The following benchmarks are taken at the medium graphics preset with 2x AA and 16x AF, and with character detail distance dropped to 50%

All of the discrete cards we're using, except for AMD's Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 and Nvidia's GeForce GT 630 GDDR5, yield playable average performance. There's a very obvious platform bottleneck though, seeing that the Radeon HD 7790 and GeForce GTX 650 Ti yield almost identical results next to the high-end Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680.

The Radeon HD 7750 and GeForce GTX 650 are a bit slower, though still reasonable at 34 FPS minimum.

We can see the bottleneck quite clearly looking at the frame rate over time chart.

None of these cards produce a significant frame time variance, with the results well below 15 ms.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.