Shattered Horizon Review

Item: Shattered Horizon Review
Author: Mark Mackay

Written by Mark Mackay

November 7, 2009 | 13:34

Tags: #first-person-shooter #fps #multiplayer #online #shattered-horizon #shooter #zero-g #zero-gravity

Companies: #futuremark

Graphics

With Futuremark’s benchmarking heritage there was some speculation about whether Shattered Horizon was to be some kind of glorified benchmark or tech demo. The fact that this game was to be online multiplayer only pretty much rules out any notion of repeatability and therefore reliability in benchmarking. Futuremark didn't even sneak an onboard benchmark in to fill out the package.

However that’s not to say that the game is a pushover to run - it's fairly demanding, and what's more, it's the first game we've reviewed that's got no support at all for DirectX 9 - if you're still on Windows XP, you won't be allowed out of the airlock. It's DirectX 10 or 11 only. We used a review system that we had in the labs to play the game. The core spec comprised of an ATI Radeon 5850 1GB, an Intel Core i5-750 overclocked to 3.9GHz and 4GB of DDR3 memory.

Playing the game smoothly at 1,920 x 1,200 with all settings on max was too much for this system, with the frame rate bottoming out at a stuttery 17fps. We dropped the resolution to 1,680 x 1,050 at the same settings which boosted our minimum frame rate to a considerably smoother 32fps.

On the left hand side we have the game with everything turned to minim detail and on the right everything on maximum. The main difference is in the lighting as the textures in the game are relatively simple.

The problem with this though is that the game is online only so factors such as connection speed and number of players on a server can all potentially effect your frame rate. The above testing took place on sparsely populated servers so these results were from our rig rendering the game and not processing a hectic multiplayer battle. When the servers filled up however, we saw little drop in the frame rate.

The simple textures and bright-coloured containers give the visuals a slightly cartoon-like edge not too dissimilar to Team Fortress 2

The textures in the game are largely simple affairs, giving them a slightly cartoonish quality not entirely dissimilar from Team Fortress 2, if not quite to the same extent. Because of this flatness the game still looks pretty hot when you lower settings such as texture resolution. However the straight edges of the space station for example do benefit from the anti-aliasing so if you can afford to give this at 4x AA as a minimum then you’ll spare your eyes from the noticeable jaggies.