World in Conflict

Storytime. When the WiC beta was released, several GotFrag people were onboard to test out the game and give feedback. Before the beta was released, news came of a $10,000 WiC tournament at the 2007 Summer CPL. Being the ambitions sons of guns that we are, we created a WiC team called the Silver Snakes (tag: [S~], name from Legends of the Hidden Temple (Nickelodeon)). For a while we really dominated the unorganized, public server circuit. Several us got up really high in the ranking system even though we did not play nearly as much as some of the top ranked people. We then sort of became less dedicated and totally missed going to CPL, then Fry’s cancelled our preorders of the full version of the game and our WiC adventures were pretty much over. That said, we still love the game. It offers incredible gameplay, lifelike animations and effects (with the exception of the nuke), and the zoom in/out function works amazingly well. It is a tremendously fun game that you should all try out. Also, if you buy the Collector’s Edition box, it comes with an authentic (yeah right) piece of the Berlin Wall! All settings in this game were the default ones for “Very High”, with the exception of “shadows from clouds”, as that option does not appear to be available under DirectX 9.


Once again we have the 8800GTX beating out everything else both DirectX9 and DirectX10 modes in World in Conflict. Scaling in WiC for SLI configuration appears to be very marginal, if not completely absent. The performance hit across the board when in DX10 mode is really not too bad when compared with other DX10 capable games (like Company of Heroes and Call of Juarez). In DX10 mode we have our first victory for the 8800GTS over the 8800GT. We would attribute this to the increased graphics size on the GTS, as WiC can make large expanses of land visible on your screen when fully zoomed out. It should be noted that WiC was very much playable on all of these cards when the noted FPS was above 30. WiC is an RTS game, and as such does not require a super high-FPS to run smoothly.

Team Fortress 2

Ever since the open beta became available to those who pre-ordered the game, TF2 has been a favorite of most of the GotFrag staff. We wrote an article about our impressions of the beta and both editors behind that piece pretty much loved the game. As a result of how awesome the game is we even changed our CS:S server to TF2 (we also have a CS1.6 server now, to be announced soon I expect). The game also runs on a much newer build of the Source engine than our previous entry from Valve, Half-Life 2: Episode 1. We recorded a custom timedemo on the cp_gravelpit map, but due to a really weaksauce internet connection at the time, we will have to re-record the demo under more favorable network conditions to ensure a stable framerate. All of the settings were set to the max, with AA and AF both at 8x. We did not click the Bloom (If Available) box for HDR bloom effect, and of course, vsync was disabled.


Since the graphics settings screen prominently displays the ATI logo and Valve and ATI have a long history together dating back to at least the 2004 Alcatraz launch of Half-Life 2 and the Radeon 9800XT, we would expect ATI to perform exceptionally well in TF2 or any Valve game. However, that does not appear to be the case, as the GeForce 8800GTX takes the top spot in our tests. Here we also see the first big time victory for the 8800GTS 640 over the 8800GT. There is very pronounced margin here, and quite frankly we are at a loss for why the numbers turned out as they did. Scaling in SLI is predictably poor, as it has never been too great in any Source based game. The only ATI card used in testing turned in numbers less than those of the 8800GTS but more than the 8800GT; still long off the pace of the 8800GTX at higher resolutions.