Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars

Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars is visually stunning with everything pushed to Maximum and we played most of the game with no problems whatsoever using an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX and two gigabytes of RAM. This was more than enough to pimp the graphics out to Ultra and then bump the AA to Maximum on top of it all.

It is probably worth pointing out here that we tested the game using Windows XP. We didn't have enough time to conduct testing on Vista as well and with many gamers still resisting the move we feel there is life in XP yet.

It is worth pointing out that the Minimum Requirements for the game change rather substantially depending on your choice of Microsoft operating systems. Because of the additional resources required for Vista to just boot to the desktop, running Tiberium Wars also requires some extra beef: while you can apparently get away with just 512MB of RAM under XP you will need at least 1GB if you're running Vista.

The same is true of graphics cards: a paltry 64MB card is the minimum for XP but double that is needed for a Vista system. That is probably not going to be a problem for most desktop gaming rigs but those looking to play on their notebook would be wise to note the extra requirements of Vista.

High Performance

We started our performance testing by quickly installing the game on a free computer and slapping in an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS card and a single gigabyte of RAM. We then pushed the game onto the ‘Ultra High’ graphics preset. This pushed all the settings to Maximum except for AA which stayed at Low. Obviously the developers think AA is just for the elitists. We left the resolution at 1280 x 1024 initially.

For each bout of testing we wanted to have a fair deal of action going on to see how the game handled and so elected an eight player Skirmish match. I pitted myself against seven CPU players on maximum difficulty and watched rockets fly.

The action on screen was a little jerky, though still playable at around 16 FPS on average, but we oomphed up to 1600 x 1200 anyway because we’re show-offs at heart. This had a negative impact on the FPS obviously, with highs of 25 and lows of just 14, but the game was still easily playable.

It was here that we found things got a little weird and a small group of on-lookers started to hunker around the testing rig. We pushed in another gig of RAM and found this only increased the FPS to around 18. What exactly would it take to get a framerate in the more preferable 30s?

In the end we found that the game seemed to inexplicably prefer ATI cards slightly. Pushing in an X1950 Pro and using the Ultra High preset allowed the game to function at a rock solid 30 frames, never falling below 28 FPS for more than a second.

Mid-range Performance

Dropping the graphics preset to a more lenient Medium setting bought Terrain Detail and Texture Detail much lower than we would have liked and caused one staff member to remark on how the game looked ‘like arse’ at anything lower than the High preset. Strangely, despite having a 7900 GS, 2GB of RAM and still being in a low resolution the framerate didn’t launch forwards like we would expect, reaching highs of 24 FPS.

Because the texture detail suffers so much in the medium preset, we really wouldn’t suggest playing the game on this setting. It just looks awful and does an injustice to an otherwise great looking game. It only really remains useful for people who need to game on the go and even in that case they may be better off just picking up a copy of Red Alert instead.

Low Detail

Now this is where it started to get really ugly. The same 7900 GS and 2GB of RAM on the Very Low preset only bought an improvement of four frames a second overall and looked like the underside of a particularly nasty piece of roadkill. It puzzled us that dropping the graphics settings didn’t seem to do much in regards to the framerate. Was the game more CPU intensive, or was the engine just incapable of anything more than 30 FPS?

We swapped processors on the game to rule out the former but still weren’t able to squeeze 30 FPS out without using an ATI card, leaving us more than a little confused at it all.