Benchmarks Results: Ultra Quality
Ultra quality ups the graphical ante compared to the Medium quality setting, with softer shadows and lighting enhancements. Let’s see if it’s enough to shift the performance bottleneck from the CPU to the graphics card.
We definitely see the graphics card limiting performance here, with the low-end Radeons unable to provide smooth 1280x1024 performance. The GeForce GT 240 delivers performance on the edge of what you might consider playable for a real-time strategy (RTS) title.
The Radeon HD 5830, GeForce GTX 460, and faster cards manage to muster playable performance all the way up to 2560x1600. But the average frame rate does improve with higher-end hardware. The CPU-limited minimum frame rates never go higher than 23 at the Ultra setting, though, which doesn’t bode well for users with low-end systems who would like to push graphics quality to the highest available level.