Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , September 16, 2013
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Saints Row IV Video Card Performance and IQ Review

Deep Silver's next game is out in the Saints Row saga. Today we examine Saints Row IV focusing on the games performance with the latest hardware on the market. We dissect image quality in great detail and find out if this is a game we expect to see in 2013, or if it falls flat on its face in the innovation department.

Introduction

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In this evaluation we are going to look at image quality and performance in Saints Row IV. We are not going to be evaluating the gameplay, or the storyline. We all know this game is fun, and should be played for its gameplay and story, in fact we recommend it. This evaluation solely focuses on the image quality, performance, and technology of this game and approaches our conclusion from that standpoint specifically.

This is an action-adventure game developed by Volition, Inc. and published by Deep Silver and was recently released on August 20th, 2013. Currently this game holds a Metascore of 86/100 on the PC. Gameplay reviews have been mixed.

It is the fourth installment in the Saints Row series. Saints Row IV takes place in Steelport, the same city as Saints Row 3. It follows the story of the President, who is the leader of the Third Street Saints, and takes place 5 years after the events of Saints Row the third. Players will fight to wreak chaos against an alien invasion, inside the simulated world of Steelport. Any AI can mutate and become an alien that’s shooting you, and with the new superpowers of sprinting and power jumping, everything feels very reminiscent of The Matrix.

Saints Row IV uses the proprietary CTG Engine, which was also used two years ago with Saints Row: The Third. There may have been some small visual improvements for this game, but no new graphics options or innovative technologies have been added. It does utilize the DX11 API, however there are no modern day DX11 graphics options available.

Saints Row IV Graphics Options

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Anti-Aliasing : The only AA available in this game is MSAA. It can be enabled at 2X, 4X, and 8X MSAA, or disabled. This surprisingly does not have a very large impact on performance.

Scene Detail : This setting should be left on high. It determines the quality and detail that goes in to a scene. We would not recommend lower it.

Lighting Detail : This setting can be enabled on High and Low. It determines the quality of lighting in the game. It has a moderate impact on performance.

Shadow Detail : This setting can be enabled at low, medium, high, or off. It determines the quality of the shadow being cast by a person or object in-game. The higher the quality the more solid and crisp shadows will appear. It has a moderate impact on performance.

Reflections : This option determines the quality of reflections we see in game. It has a low impact on performance.

Post Processing Detail : This setting can be enabled at low, high, and off. This graphics option actually supports three other settings. HDR, motion blur, and depth of field. HDR focuses mainly on the bloom or glow around lighting. Motion blur will kick in anytime an object is moving quickly past us, or if we are driving or flying fast. Depth of field unfocused objects in the background, to make what we are focusing on clearer and easier to see. This setting has the largest performance impact.

Ambient Occlusion : This option can be set to Low, Medium, High, and off. This is the simplest form of ambient occlusion. It has a moderate initial performance impact, but higher levels of it do not require much more performance.

Testing Saints Row IV

To test Saints Row IV we first played through the entire game. We looked for scenes, levels, or areas which produced lower framerates than others. Our run-through takes place on the western side of Steelport. The entire testing procedure takes 7 minutes to complete. For the first 30 seconds of the mission we are driving in a car, running over people, posts, and anything in our way to get to a shootout with a pack of aliens. We remain here for a minute and a half until all aliens are dead. Then we spend 2 minutes driving from north western Steelport to the south west part of the city. At 4 minutes into our testing procedure we start up the tank mayhem mini-game. It takes us a minute and a half to complete the mission. After beating the mission once we immediately load it again, and play it for the remainder of the time. This gives us 3 solid minutes of big explosions and lots of chaos on screen. We found that most video cards became playable and smooth when averaging around 40 FPS. There are a few instances where slightly lower framerates were playable.