Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars

Model Detail

Unlike many of the other graphical tweaks available in the game, Model Detail is only available in two flavours: Low and High. The reason for this is that the 3D Model Artists have to take their high-polygon original building and vehicles and strip out as many triangles as they can while still preserving the original shape as best they can.

Of course there are other knock-on considerations also: collision detection bounding boxes for the AI pathfinding must also be carefully considered lest a unit get snagged on a piece of high-detail building that wasn't there before in Low Detail mode.

Almost as bad would be for vehicles to clip through the corners because the bounding box for Low Detail was applied to the High Detail model.

Let's see how EALA fared...


Given the restriction that a building's footprint cannot fundamentally change, the differences are largely superficial. If you look closely you will see that the natural curves have been sacrificed for a more squared approach. As we saw earlier, if you had only ever played the game at Low Detail you might not feel short-changed; after all, it's about the gameplay rather than the graphics, right?

Well, it is and yet it's nice to have the bells & whistles. Windows that are actually recessed into the wall rather than just looking like a white, square decal on a wall. High Model Detail adds niceties like random NPC guards on buildings and elevates vehicles to a higher level of sophistication above just a box-on-wheels.

Naturally the differences are most obvious when zooming in close and some of you might argue that you will spend 99% of your time using the fully zoomed-out view. We wouldn't disagree but when you compare the two levels of detail even from this perspective, it's no surprise that High Detail looks better.

Water Detail

Water Detail is a curious piece of eye-candy. There are four settings on the slider: Low, Medium, High and Ultra. As you can see from the screenshot, Ultra looks pretty darn gorgeous yet we had trouble discerning any great difference between Medium, High and Ultra - they all looked really good.

Dropping to Low Detail has a huge impact visually and yet, as before, if this had been your starting point you really wouldn't be that unhappy. The pixel shaders are doing a great job creating the illusion of waves and the only things missing are the sun-glint highlights and some transparency that gives the water that real feeling of depth.

While some members of the congregated staff seemed to prefer the lower setting and found it oddly calming, others found it a cheap and ineffective trick used to mask the lower quality.

It should also be pointed out that for the vast majority of the game there is very little water to be seen, so that low-end PC users could easily set Water Detail to Low and barely notice the difference.