NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS

City of Villains

Publisher: NCSoft

We used NCSoft's latest MMORPG title, City of Villains, which is based on the same OpenGL engine that is used in the already popular City of Heroes MMO. However, the new expansion has lead to an engine update, meaning that the game is a lot more intensive than City of Heroes was.

The engine uses a massive amount of particle effects, bloom effects, geometry instancing, and depth of field effects. The world is a massive area, and depending on the capabilities of your video card, it is possible to increase both the world detail and the character detail to 200%. This improves the draw distance and adds even more detail in to the already detailed surroundings.

We controlled both Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering from inside the game.

You can read more about City of Villains in our full review.


Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. The title is an MMORPG, so frame rate isn't quite as critical as it would be in a first person shooter, so we have aimed for 15 frames per second minimum and an average frame rate of over 30 frames per second.

The GeForce 6800 GS and XFX GeForce 6800 GT delivered a very comparable gaming experience and you would not be able to tell the two apart in this title. We found that 1024x768 4xAA 16xAF with very high texture detail, 100% world detail and 100% heavy bloom to be very playable on both of these video cards. However, after spending more time playing through City of Villains, we found that the gaming experience was greatly improved by changing the driver quality settings to 'High Quality'. This removed some shimmering that we were seeing occasionally when using the default driver settings.

We mentioned that there was a bug in either the game or in ATI's drivers when we reviewed City of Villains last week, where Anti-Aliasing does not seem to work. We tried forcing Anti-Aliasing from the driver, as well as from the in-game graphics option screen, but had no luck whatsoever. We're still waiting for ATI's driver team to come back to us on this.

The performance on the Club 3D Radeon X800XL and HIS X800GTO iTurbo is about the same. We found that 1024x768 0xAA 8xAF with high world textures, medium character textures, 100% world detail and 100% regular bloom. The frame rate was notably lower and choppier than what we experienced on the two NVIDIA cards.