Multi-GPU World Tour Part 7: Uncommon Benchmarks 2

Star Wars: Empire at War

Star Wars Empire at War puts the power to command an entire war for the star wars galaxy in the hands of players, giving them the freedom to determine how they play the game within the completely scalable and accessible gameplay. Set a few years before the events of Episode IV, A New Hope, Lucasarts’ new pc game lets players wage war on ground and in space, as well as experience the creation of the rebel alliance, the strengthening of the empire and the beginnings of the galactic civil war.

Empire at War uses a custom graphics engine built on Microsoft?s DirectX 9, which Petroglyph dubbed ?Alamo.? The engine was designed from the ground up to fully support pixel and vertex shaders, and it uses 3DStudio Max with a custom plugin to generate content for the engine. The game is entirely shader driven, which allowed the developers to easily customize visual development while being fully optimized to run on a wide variety of PC hardware. Let’s see if this is true on our three test platforms.

Low End:

This is another RTS game that benefits greatly from CPU power. As we have seen in nearly all of the other tests the 7600GS SLI solution is the fastest across the line here and is mildly CPU limited here.

Mid End:

In the Mid-End system we see a signifcant CPU bottleneck with the 7950GX2. While we do have an X2 CPU for this system it runs 200MHz slower than the Low-End single core processor.

High End:

Now with AMD’s fastest processor in the FX-62 we see that the graphics leader doesn’t really change but we have a really nice increase in frame rate. The 7900GTX SLI system is ever so slightly faster at max settings.