Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Thief Video Card Performance Preview

Thief, being the first game to support AMD's TrueAudio, as well as Mantle API technology is here. Out of the gate the two compelling technologies of the game are missing. Therefore we will take a look today at how the game performs under D3D between AMD and NVIDIA so you will know what to expect out of the game in this Preview.

Thief Introduction

Thief, a brand new game just released on February 25th, is here for the playing. Without getting into too much game detail, Thief is a stealth game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. Technically this is the fourth game in the Thief series which has been a very popular game. This new Thief represents a sort of a reboot for the series, much like Tomb Raider did last year. Game reviews have been very critical of the game, citing lackluster story, plot, character development, and an underwhelming world environment. We aren't so much interested in those aspects, in fact there are only two aspects to the game that have drawn our attention to it.

Thief will support AMD's TrueAudio technology and AMD's Mantle API technology. We say "will," because at the launch, those two promoted features are missing from the game. Those two features will come to the game somewhere in mid-March via a game patch according to AMD. This is important because as far back as early October last year Thief was being promoted touting these features. Only time will tell if these features show up as promised.

We reached out to AMD's Robert Hallock, public relations manager in charge of the Thief launch at AMD to find out why these features were not ready at the time of game launch. Below is a joint statement from Eidos-Montreal and AMD as to the explanation:

We believe that Mantle and AMD TrueAudio technology provide the best audio/visual experience available in gaming. Ensuring gamers receive that experience is a top priority for AMD and Eidos-Montréal, which is why we are mutually investing the development time necessary to accomplish that. We know that gamers will be delighted with our efforts when the March patch for Thief debuts!

Further, posted in a blog on February 22nd, Square Enix gives us its information about the two technologies.

We’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done with AMD to make the PC version of THIEF a stand-out, definitive experience although we have a little more work to do to accommodate all of these new PC-specific features - we are busy working on a patch to support AMD’s Mantle and TrueAudio technologies that is scheduled for March. We’re confident this patch will ensure the best and fastest THIEF experience for AMD Radeon™ customers. We’re sorry we couldn’t bring this to you sooner – although we will use this time to bring you the very best experience possible and will let you know when the patch is ready.

After the long wait for Mantle to come to Battlefield 4 we would have thought they would have got it right with the next following game to showcase the technology, Thief. There is no question that TrueAudio and Mantle need all the showcasing these can get to prove the technology. At least CrossFire and Eyefinity work at game launch.

We’re happy to say that the AMD CrossFire™ technology and AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology will be fully functional when THIEF launches on the 25th February in North America and 28th February in Europe and other associated territories.

Thief Graphics Settings and Abilities

Let's talk about what is here in the game, as of right now at game launch. There have been some modern graphical features added to the game. However, we must keep in mind the game inherently runs on Unreal Engine 3, a game engine that was created back in 2004. Today, Unreal Engine 3 games are not pushing the graphic boundaries of video cards all that much, and perform rather well on low-level video cards. This means high-end cards like the R9 290X aren't much sought after for games like this, where the gameplay experience is already at full throttle on less expensive video cards.

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When you launch Thief these are the graphic options available to you to set before the game starts. In the first "Display" setup box you can set the game to fullscreen, set the resolution, set the refresh rate and set VSYNC. For the VSYNC option this game supports "Off," "Double Buffer," and "Triple Buffer." NVIDIA's Stereoscopic 3D is also supported.

On the "Graphics" tab is where all the goodies are for turning on the modern graphics features. There are your standard texture quality, shadow quality, depth-of-field quality, and texture filtering quality options. In the screenshot above we have the highest options enabled on all those features. In addition, this game supports SSAA. The two available options for SSAA are simply "Low" and "High" SSAA.

The rest of the features are check-mark options to enable or disable the modern DX11 effects. This game supports screenspace reflections, parallax occlusion mapping, contact hardening shadows, and tessellation. There is also a check-box for FXAA if you don't have the performance needed for SSAA. FXAA will create a slight blur in the game, but it is better than having no aliasing at all although that is not true for all games.

Test Setup

This article today represents a preview of video card performance in Thief. We sat down and played the game on the PC the morning of release, and wrote this article the same day. A full-evaluation will eventually follow, but we don't see any point for that article until TrueAudio and Mantle are supported in the game.

Test system specs are: ASUS Maximus V Extreme, Intel i7 3770K @ 4.8, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD, 1350W PSU, Dell 3007WFP 30" display, Windows 8.1 x64. For all AMD cards we are using AMD's newly released Catalyst 14.2 Beta 1.3. For all NVIDIA cards we are using ForceWare 334.89.