One of the most ancient and well-deserved (and then undeservedly forgotten) gaming franchises, which dates back to 1989, has returned to life after a long 18 years since MechWarrior 4: Black Knight. I would like to say that it has returned triumphantly, but, alas, the public, which did not find DOS and 486 processors, has already lost the habit of rather tricky gameplay of fantastic simulators in the BattleTech setting. Unfortunately, there will be no reviews for Mercenaries, but instead we'll be happy to hear what veterans of the first series think about it, if there are such among 3DNews readers - feel free to express your opinion in the comments! In return, we invite you to take a look at the MechWarrior 5 technical review, which we were able to release due to a temporary lull on the gaming graphics front after the recent release. .
Graphics quality settings
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is based on the hugely popular Unreal Engine 4 graphics engine. But UE 4, like other equally common platforms - Unity and Frostbite, does not in itself give the game a certificate of quality and is just a software backbone on which developers string additional components. In this case, real-time ray tracing was supposed to be the title feature of the project. Piranha Games is one of the first game studios to announce support for NVIDIA RTX and DLSS technologies, and no Unreal Engine 5-based game with such features has yet been released before MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries. Moreover, Mercenaries will receive the most complete set of traced effects, including shadows, reflections and Ambient Occlusion, than among the few projects under the RTX On flag, only ΠΈ (everyone else uses DXR functions selectively to render certain lighting components).
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Alas, this will not happen immediately. The publishers decided to release the game early, robbing developers of the time needed for a smooth implementation of DXR, but they promise to catch up in the first months of 2020. And at the same time, you see, the Piranha Games team will work on performance, because in early interviews they talked about frame rates of about 60 FPS at 1080p resolution and limited DXR effects, and together with traced reflections they advised to focus on a modest 30. It seems that without Deep Learning Super Sampling owners of modern GeForce RTX accelerators cannot do without MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, and this, as we have seen more than once, is a capricious technology that does not tolerate haste. Let Piranha Games take gamers two months better than repeat the incident with early DLSS neural networks in ΠΈ .
The screenshots above show what MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries will look like after the promised DXR patch. In the meantime, the graphics of the game is quite ascetic. It seems that too much - both surface materials and lighting - the developers initially prepared with the prospect of real-time ray tracing. Even support for the modern Direct3D 12 API had to be left for later. This is probably the reason why MechWarrior 5 landscape detail fluctuates so much from one mission to another, and with it the frame rate.
| Graphics quality settings in tests | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Low quality | Medium quality | Maximum quality | |
| View Distance Quality | Near | Medium | Maximum |
| Effect Quality | low | Medium | Maximum |
| Shadow Quality | low | Medium | Maximum |
| Texture Quality | low | Medium | Maximum |
| Foliage | low | Medium | Maximum |
| Post Processing Quality | low | Medium | Maximum |
| Anti-Aliasing Quality | low | Medium | Maximum |
| Anysotropy Quality | 16x | 16x | 16x |
| sharpening | off | off | off |
In anticipation of the upcoming update, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries looks poor (except for the luxurious interior of the hangar with "Mechs", which is why we chose it as a test scene), but especially at medium and even lower graphics settings. Fortunately, even in tests of low-power GPUs, we did not change the anisotropic filtering parameter from x16 in order to maintain the quality of texture rendering. After all, the era of GeForce 3-class accelerators is too long gone for texture filtering to have any significant effect on performance.
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The only thing left to focus on is the Sharpening setting, which should enhance the clarity of the image using the FidelityFX libraries - created by AMD, but working on graphics processors of any manufacturer. Whether it benefits the image is a matter of taste. But, strictly speaking, the clarity filter in this case simply compensates - and at the same time partially nullifies - the result of a not very high-quality full-screen anti-aliasing algorithm. Anyway, FidelityFX runs almost free for GPU speed. A more interesting experiment will come out if the game allows you to combine the clarity option with DLSS, but again, this will have to be postponed until better times.
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Test stand, testing methodology
| Test stand | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i9-9900K (4,9GHz, 4,8GHz in AVX, fixed frequency) |
| Motherboard | ASUS MAXIMUS XI APEX |
| RAM | G.Skill Trident Z RGB F4-3200C14D-16GTZR, 2Γ8 GB (3200 MHz, CL14) |
| ROM | Intel SSD 760p, 1024 GB |
| Power supply unit | Corsair AX1200i 1200W |
| CPU cooling system | Corsair Hydro Series H115i |
| Chassis | CoolerMaster Test Bench V1.0 |
| Monitor | NEC EA244UHD |
| Operating system | Windows 10 Pro x64 |
| AMD GPU software | |
| All video cards | AMD Radeon Software Adrenaline 2020 Edition 19.12.2 |
| NVIDIA GPU software | |
| All video cards | NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 441.66 |
Performance measurement was performed using the OCAT utility during a walk through the hangar with "mechs". The average and minimum frame rates are derived from an array of individual frame render times that the game writes to the results file. The average frame rate in the charts is the reciprocal of the average frame rendering time. To estimate the minimum frame rate, the number of frames generated in each second of the test is calculated. From this array of numbers, the value corresponding to the 1st percentile of the distribution is taken.
Test participants
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- AMD Radeon RX 560 14CU (1090/1175MHz, 7000Mbps, 4GB);
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- AMD Radeon R9 370X (-/1000MHz, 5600Mbps, 2GB);
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Note. In brackets after the names of the video cards, the base and boost frequencies are indicated according to the specifications of each device. Video cards of non-reference design are brought into line with the reference parameters (or close to the latter), provided that this can be done without manually adjusting the clock frequency curve. Otherwise (GeForce 16 series accelerators, as well as GeForce RTX Founders Edition accelerators), the manufacturer's settings are used.
Source: 3dnews.ru