Date:
Tuesday , September 01, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Wolfenstein Gameplay Performance and IQ

Just in case you needed some more Nazis to kill in brutal and entertaining ways, the "new" Wolfenstein is here to deliver your supernatural World War II fix! We'll check it out on a broad range of video cards from the GeForce GTX 295 down to the Radeon HD 4770. Come with us as we find out what sustenance this game has to offer our starving video cards.

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Graphics Options in Wolfenstein

To be frank, the graphics options in Wolfenstein are pathetic for a PC game. There are six options that are actually interesting, and the rest are things like resolution, aspect ratio, refresh rate, vsync, and brightness. It is disappointing, to say the least. The entire menu system already feels like a console-controller driven kludge, and the graphics options menus are just the icing on that cake of failure.

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Upon entering the video options menu, the first thing you see is the Display Options submenu. The Display options menu allows you to change monitor-specific settings like resolution, aspect ratio, refresh rate, and "Monitor Refresh Sync", or vsync. It also allows you to select between Windowed and Full Screen mode. Don’t forget to click "Apply Settings" when you are done.

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The Render Options submenu allows you to change the brightness level of the game.

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The Performance Options Submenu is where we find what we are looking for, though it is somewhat underwhelming.

Machine Performance

The Machine Performance option is a macro setting which automatically adjusts the other options depending on which option you select. It has three settings: High, Medium, and Low. We did not utilize this feature.

Shadow Quality

The Shadow Quality option has three settings: High, Medium, and Low, and would more accurately be called "Shadow Quantity." Choosing lower settings here simply removes shadows from certain types of objects.

Post Process Quality

The Post Process Quality option has two settings: High, and Low. From what we were able to observe, it mostly just toggles the HDR bloom lighting effect.

Detail Maps

The Detail Maps option is a toggle option (Enabled or Disabled) and turns off the use of detail textures which add detail to the surface of many game objects to reduce the appearance of blurriness when textures are viewed up close. It is an effective technique and has been used by quite a number of games for a long time.

Specular

The Specular option is also a toggle option (Enabled or Disabled) and turns off surface reflections. Just about every object in this game is capable of reflecting light to some degree, and it adds a nice touch of realism when you see light glinting off of a rifle or reflecting off of some wet cobble-stones in the streets of Isenstadt.

Decals

Decals are things like burn marks, blood splatters, and bullet holes. The Decals option toggles these effects on and off.

Texture Filtering and Max Anisotropy

The Texture Filtering option allows the gamer to select Bilinear, Trilinear, and Anisotropic Texture filtering. The Max Anisotropy slider allows the selection of what sample rate of (2X to 16X) anisotropic texture filtering to use. In our testing, there was only an extremely minimal performance impact between bilinear filtering and full anisotropy.

Anti-Aliasing

Obviously, there is no in-game anti-aliasing option. In addition, forcing AA from the NVIDIA and AMD control panels is ineffective, marking yet another game in an increasingly long series of titles without functional AA at launch. Whether this is a game engine technology issue or a driver issue, we cannot be certain. What we can be certain of, however, is that the lack of AA is irritating.

Test Scenario

During our play testing, we discovered that the "Fortified Farm" mission offered the most challenge to our video cards. Of course, that is all relative. It is more challenging than, for example, Quake III, but rather less challenging than Crysis or ARMA II. Nonetheless, it was the only part of the game that made our testing rig consider rendering less than 60 frames per second on the majority of our video cards. We found there is a game FPS cap of 60 FPS, you cannot exceed this even by disabling VSYNC.

So, for our Wolfenstein testing scenario, we are playing though the first five minutes of the Fortified Farm level. After that time, the player descends into an underground fortress and performance is increased overall, and so is not interesting for our purposes here.