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Παρασκευή 6 Μαΐου 2011

Section 8: Prejudice PC Performance Analysis

Section 8: Prejudice is a first-person shooter video game developed by TimeGate Studios. It is the direct sequel to the 2009 game Section 8 and is a digital download-only title that contains more content than its predecessor. It was released for PC on May 4th and it's time to see how this Unreal 3 powered game performs with modern day PC's.

As always, we used a Q9650 @ 4.2Ghz with 4GB DDR2 and a GTX295. As we mentioned, Section 8: Prejudice is a first-person shooter that is powered by Unreal 3 engine. Contrary though to all those games that are powered by Epic's engine, performance is not as good as we'd hoped to. This is particularly due to Prejudice's inability to take full advantage of quadcores. Yeap, you read it right. A game powered by Unreal 3 engine that can't scale perfectly with modern day quadcores.


But let's take a look at the CPU usage during the campaign and conquest modes. As we can see, Section 8: Prejudice scales to CPU's with four cores but doesn't stress them. Of course we wouldn't be complaining if we had a really high framerate. You'd expect that we'd be getting around 100fps at 1080p with max settings. Things are not as ideal though. With our system we were averaging around 65-70fps. Yes, it is acceptable but there were occasions were the framerate was dropping to mid 30's. Additionally, our GPU wasn't stressed at all (GPU usage at 50%).



In order to find out if the game is CPU bound, we tried to simulate a dualcore CPU. Although the CPU scaling with our simulated dualcore system was excellent (98%), performance remained the same. To avoid any SLI incompatibility and have proper idea of what's going on, we also run the game in Single GPU mode. Nvidia has already an SLI profile for this game, but we've experienced some flickering issues. We'd advice you to disable it and run it in Single GPU mode for the time being. At least till Nvidia releases a new profile for it. In case you're wondering, performance in Single GPU mode remained the same, whether we were running a simulated dualcore or a quadcore. And we've experienced the same slowdowns, as the framerate was dropping in some occasions for no apparent reason. To overcome any GPU limitation, we've also lowered the textures quality to avoid any vRAM overload. Unfortunately though, our framerate did not increase - it should have in case we were indeed GPU limited.

The infamous 'texture pop-in' issue


So what does this mean at the end of the day? It simply means that Section 8: Prejudice is CPU bound and is optimized for dualcore processors. As a result of this, you won't gain any extra performance with a quadcore CPU. Additionally, the game will benefit from i5/i7's architecture. The game won't stress your GPU if you stick with the in-game settings. A GTX275 will be sufficient for maxing out Section 8: Prejudice's in-game settings.

Graphics wise, the game looks good. It could have been better, but let's not forget that this is a downloadable game. There are some great textures and most characters are highly detailed. Soft particles are supported, as well as parallax mapping for the bullet holes. Specular maps and post-processing effects are of high quality and although there isn't any AA in-game option, you can force higher levels of AA from your GPU's Control Panel. As with all Unreal 3 engine games, Prejudice supports dynamic streaming of high-resolution textures and is plagued with the infamous 'texture pop-in' issue. The game also doesn't support Ambient Occlusion and as a result, the objects and environments seem a little 'flat'. Overall, this is not a Crysis 2 beater. It was never meant to. It still looks good though and its art direction will surely remind you of Halo.

Absence of Ambient Occlusion results to 'flat environments'


All in all, Section 8: Prejudice performs well but not as good as most games that are powered by Unreal 3 engine. This is mainly due to its inability to take advantage of quadcores. We are surprised, to say the least, as most games that used Epic's engine scaled great with quadcores. So how come Section 8: Prejudice doesn't? It's really weird and those with stock Q6600's will surely encounter performance issues. If you do, make sure to lower the 'World Detail' setting as this option has the highest CPU performance hit when maxed out.

Enjoy the following screenshots!



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