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, 5760x1080

The Cryptic engine supports multi-monitor resolutions, so we continue our exploration of the medium detail settings at 5760x1080 using three 1920x1080 panels side by side. All multi-GPU results are captured using our FCAT tools, so drops and runt frames are removed from the analysis.

The sheer number of pixels we're rendering shifts the bottleneck from our platform back to the CPU. That is, until we arm our machine with higher-end hardware like the Radeon HD 7950 and GeForce GTX 690. The GeForce GTX 680 does relatively poorly compared to the Radeons, but the GeForce GTX Titan takes a slim lead over its competition. Two Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire should be faster. However, a low minimum frame rate, drops, and runt frames all contribute to a second-place finish.

Once again, you can see the platform bottleneck manifest at the upper end of our frame rate over time chart.

Only the Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire setup is hampered by a worrisome degree of frame time variance.

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.