Building a £400 Gaming PC

World in Conflict

Publisher: Sierra

We regard World in Conflict as one of the best real-time strategy games we've ever played. It's based on Microsoft's DirectX 10 API and it incorporates some DirectX 10 specific graphics effects.

The first of these is a soft particle effect that removes the banding often found in particle effects like smoke, explosions, fire and debris - the effects simply didn't exist in the 3D world; instead, they were merely an add-on. With DirectX 10, the edges of the particle effects are much softer and banding is almost non-existent as the effects now interact with their 3D surroundings, as they're actually a part of the 3D world.

Additionally there are global cloud shadowing and volumetric lighting effects in the DirectX 10 version of the game. The latter is often referred to as 'god rays' and its implementation in World in Conflict interacts with the surroundings incredibly well. On the other hand, the former is where clouds cast shadows on the rest of the environment and, because all clouds in World in Conflict are volumetric and dynamic, the shadows cast by the clouds are rendered dynamically in DirectX 10 - they adjust in relation to the size, shape and orientation of the cloud in relation to the light source.

For our testing purposes, we used a full retail copy of the game and patched it to version 1.007, which includes a few fixes and some improved performance under DirectX 10. We used a manual run through from the Invasion level, which incorporates all of the effects we've discussed above. We chose not to use the built-in benchmark because it's largely CPU-limited.

We manually adjusted the in-game settings to find the highest-playable settings at both 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050 - both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled via the advanced settings tab in the game's graphics options menu.



With the system in its 'stock' state, we found that the game was playable with 2xAA and the high-quality preset enabled. At these settings, we found that our system delivered an acceptable gaming experience, but it was definitely nothing special. Like Crysis, we found that World in Conflict was both CPU and GPU limited to an extent after independently overclocking the two parts of our system.

After overclocking the CPU, we saw a frame rate boost that allowed us to turn on some of the graphical effects associated with the very high preset, but we couldn't just set and forget without the GPU overclock as well. When both parts of the system were overclocked, we found that we could not only turn the very high preset on, but we could also increase the number of anti-aliasing samples from 2x to 4x and still maintain higher frame rates.

The experience was incredibly immersive and enjoyable with everything turned up to very high quality settings and the gameplay improvements were very noticeable.


With the resolution cranked up to 1,680 x 1,050, we saw a similar pattern of events to those that we experienced at 1,280 x 1,024. This time, we couldn't enable anti-aliasing at all and we were again limited to the high quality graphical preset on the stock-clocked system. After overclocking, we could enable both the very high graphical preset and also 2xAA for good measure - with this, we not only saw vastly improved image quality, but also much better frame rates too.