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Gaming Notebooks: The Full Story

Author	Stuart Andrews
Published	22nd Mar 2007

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Smooth motion is the be-all and end-all of my next trial title, Simbin’s GTR2, but surprisingly the game ran fluidly even with detail levels set to high, perhaps with a hint of slowdown during replays. With a speedy dual-core CPU, the game’s high-end physics simulation doesn’t pose any problems either, making this a definite hit for our mid-range marvel.

Dark Messiah still looks good at playable settings, but that's nothing compared to how it looked on the SLI machine!

My final choice was Arkane’s Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. This fantasy-based, first-person action game – an unholy crossbreed of Thief and Half-Life 2 – is one of the more visually ambitious titles to use Valve’s Source engine, and with all settings pushed to full and 2x Anti-Aliasing, 2x Anisotropic Filtering turned on it was a desperate, flickscreen affair. Even with the recommended settings – AA switched off, Bilinear filtering, most detail levels set to high and GFX Detail set to Auto – it struggled. All was well when simply running down a corridor, but the frame rate collapsed as soon as a couple of foes popped out to engage our hero in combat. In the end, a playable frame rate took a bit of careful balancing, with most detail levels set to medium and Shader and Shadow Detail set to low. It’s hardly ideal, but even with these compromises the game still looks pretty darn good.

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