Rainbow Six: Vegas: A Performance Analysis
by Josh Venning on December 25, 2006 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gaming
Mainstream/Midrange Performance
Rainbow Six: Vegas is a graphically intensive game, but as we said, we didn't have to play it at the highest resolution for it to look good. 1024x768 isn't a bad compromise to get a good balance of performance and graphics out of the game. When we step down to the midrange cards, this is really the most that any of these cards can handle at the higher detail settings. The X1650 XT is your best choice for playing this game at 1024x768 at the highest settings, but some overclocking might still be necessary. The slightly higher price of the X1650 XT (if you can find it right now) would still be a better choice for this game than the 7600 GT - its direct competitor from NVIDIA - because of the extra performance we see here.
Now let's look at how these cards perform with the same benchmark at the lower quality settings.
We can see that with NVIDIA, the amount of performance gain we generally see from turning the graphics quality settings down varies from around 40% to 45%. With ATI however, the performance gains are around 55% to 60%. This means obviously we'll have a better chance of picking up more performance and playing the game at a higher resolution with ATI cards by turning the quality settings down.
Rainbow Six: Vegas is a graphically intensive game, but as we said, we didn't have to play it at the highest resolution for it to look good. 1024x768 isn't a bad compromise to get a good balance of performance and graphics out of the game. When we step down to the midrange cards, this is really the most that any of these cards can handle at the higher detail settings. The X1650 XT is your best choice for playing this game at 1024x768 at the highest settings, but some overclocking might still be necessary. The slightly higher price of the X1650 XT (if you can find it right now) would still be a better choice for this game than the 7600 GT - its direct competitor from NVIDIA - because of the extra performance we see here.
Now let's look at how these cards perform with the same benchmark at the lower quality settings.
We can see that with NVIDIA, the amount of performance gain we generally see from turning the graphics quality settings down varies from around 40% to 45%. With ATI however, the performance gains are around 55% to 60%. This means obviously we'll have a better chance of picking up more performance and playing the game at a higher resolution with ATI cards by turning the quality settings down.
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kreacher - Monday, May 21, 2007 - link
I would love to see an update on this article once the 2600 has been released.SGTLindy - Saturday, December 30, 2006 - link
it runs better on ATI and does not have many graphics options because its a Xbox 360 port!!Runs great on the 360....runs slower on the PC....wow that was tuff to figure out.
Gears of War looks better on the U3 engine because...the GOW team made the U3 engine...if anyone is going to know how to tweak a U3 based game it would be them, especially since the engine just came out.
None of this is rocket science.
Sharky974 - Friday, December 29, 2006 - link
There is a user over at B3D saying his Rainbow Six Vegas box (he also provided a photo) says Unreal engine 2, NOT Unreal engine 3. And his photo backs that up. Apparantly R6 might be a "UE2.5" game.Anand wouldn't be the only site to make that mistake, but you guys might wanna look into it..
bisket - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
exactly, rocky.the heli rides do not tax my system at all. it's during levels that i have the *oh so very annoying* fps random drops to 20 from 60.
i just hope this is not a growing trend in games. enough said. anandtech rocks! ;)
R0CKY - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Was benchmarking the heli ride in these test really the best way to test Vegas performance? What percentage of the game is actually spent flying in a heli, and is testing the part of the game where the player switches off and doesn't really care what is going on in game the best part of the game to test?I appreciate there was no easy way to benchmark due to there being no in-game system to replay the same scene more than once, but at the end of the day it is the game's performance during firefights and urban scenes that is of interest to the gamer, not level-transition heli rides.
Is it valid to assume that the engines rednering performance is the same for detailed character models as it is for long draw/low detail high altitude scenes?
Rather than settling for an easily reproducible scene of little revelance, personally I'd would have liked to have seen something a bit more relevant tested, even if it took some ingenuity to come up. It is possible to get quite accurate comparisons, for example, by simply recording the FPS as a character runs the same path through a level several times - at least that way we'd get a report showing FPS from scenes the player is interested in, rather than unimportant heli rides.
That comes of like a bit of a rant, but it is meant to be constructive comment, honest!
:o)
mlambert890 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Weird, but to be honest, I actually do better in game (even during fire-fights), then in that heli ride. My thinking was that the engine isnt particularly efficient at rendering the wide-open city scape.With an FX-60 o/c to 2.8Ghz and an X1900XTX@650/775 and 2GB PC3200 I get 30-40fps on the heli ride, but I very rarely dip below 45fps in game. A couple of the big fights dropped into the 20's but it didnt really disrupt play that badly. Gameplay for 90% of the game ended up better than the heli ride bench would have implied.
If you're interested, AMDZone did an R6:V bench using an avg of in-game framerates rather than the heli ride:
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&...">http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=m...q=viewar...
VooDooAddict - Monday, February 19, 2007 - link
thanks for the link to that review. Especially like the Single Core vs Dual Core and Dual Core vs Quad.anandtech02148 - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Gears of War got excellent lighting n shadows,worst unreal 3 engine game... REd orchestra.
i like the first paragraph of this article, It hit the spot, consider i have downloaded 2Gig of patches for BF2!!!
considered games now break the $100 easily for a title.
bisket - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
i don't see really, how this game can get that much praise.1. first off no widescreen support for pc except with a hack.
2. imo i thought graw look a heck of a lot better then this. i hate ports from consoles to pc they dumb it down too much.
3. i'm running a 8800gtx with a c2d 6600 with 2 gigs of pc6400 ram. and this game game me a good 60 fps (1920x1200 everything maxed with widescreen hack) in some areas. in some areas my fps droped to 20 which is unexceptable and just plain dumb. why? maybe because it's just a port and not optimized, i don't care if it's the unreal 3 engine or not, i'm not impressed.
4. before i bash it too hard, i do have to say that despite it's major flaws the game is fun and could be *tons* better.
5. i took this over to a friends house that has the dell 30" and same setup as me (8800gtx and whatnot) and we could not establish a framerate over 30fps, which is just ridiculous. i do not look forward to future pc games that are ported from a console. i will be saving my money next time.
6. why all the low-res texture nonsense? and low geometry? i just don't get it.
7. also, praise for the smoke? it looks bad (as in, not good), IMHO.
i give this game a 5.5 out of 10.
summary: decent graphics with major glitches and major fps drops in random places. fun gameplay. have fun playing online when it doesn't crash. very cool cover system and nice enemy ai.
100proof - Thursday, December 28, 2006 - link
8.) Ingame advertising ---> spyware..http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/380106502...">http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/380106502...
My question is why don't Review sites like Anandtech hold game publishers like EA and Ubisoft accountable for this new trend of double dipping? Why also aren't publishers held accountable for not having information about spyware on outside of the packaging?
Credit goes to SlipperyJim for info/screencaps below
This shows traffic from when you double click the game icon to when it says "Press any key to begin:
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas1.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas1.gif
Traffic from when you select "Multiplayer > Online":
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas2.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas2.gif
Traffic from when you login with your Username and Password:
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas3.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas3.gif
Traffic when you get a list of games:
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas4.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas4.gif
The interesting locations seems to be "locate.madserver.net" and Demonware.
"madserver.net" is Massive Incorporated server. This is the server for in-game adverts. If you add "locate.madserver.net" to your Windows host file it appears to block the in-game advertising. Below is a link to how it is blocked in Swat 4 (follow the same method but add "locate.madserver.net" to the list):
http://nationalcheeseemporium.org/">http://nationalcheeseemporium.org/
DemonWare is a company that offers matchmaking services (probably just like Gamespy in that they will check your CD key and maintain a master server list of available games). It also is a company that has lobby advertising and also offers something called "DemonWare DNA" which sounds a lot like spyware. Frown
http://www.demonware.net/">http://www.demonware.net/
quote:
The most shocking part was next. The client contacted madserver to tell the advertisers how long the gamer spent with each advert in their view. This is mapped to the gamer id, so they know which player in the game saw the advert, and when, for how long, and from how far away (by virtue of the size attribute). Even the average viewing angle is passed back.